Deep Dive
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From GayQED in San Francisco, I'm Mina Kim. Coming up on Forum, the political ideology motivating Musk and other Silicon Valley billionaires like Peter Thiel, who are finding their wealth and influence going very far in today's Washington.
With Doge's shuttering of agencies, the mass firings of workers, and the flouting of political norms, journalist Gil Duran says we're actually seeing a, quote, methodical implementation of a long-planned strategy to transform American democracy into corporate autocracy. We'll learn more about the playbook Duran says is motivating the tech right. Join us.
Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. There's an ideology influencing the chaotic and destructive actions of Elon Musk's doge, or the ideas and statements of Vice President J.D. Vance, and others with prominent roles in Trump's administration. That's according to my guest Gil Duran, a freelance journalist who writes the newsletter called The Nerd Reich.
Some of these ideas and principles originated with Silicon Valley elites, or they've been heavily promoted by them, like PayPal founder Peter Thiel. Duran is here to explain this all to us. Welcome to Forum, Gil. Thanks for having me. Glad to have you. So one of the ideological underpinnings comes from Curtis Yarvin, a computer engineer, as I understand it, whom you've described as one of Peter Thiel's favorite thinkers. Who is he? What does he believe?
Curtis Yarvin is a San Francisco software programmer who in the early 2000s started blogging under the name Minchus Moldbug. And in his blog posts, very internet troll stuff, he laid out these ideas for replacing democracy with tech-controlled dictatorships. He specifically focused on San Francisco, which he said in his corporate tech dictatorship would be renamed Friskorp. And in Friskorp...
You would have to have swipe in with RFID chips and be under total surveillance and give up all of your freedom in exchange for security. He also suggested that the way we might deal with unproductive people would be to turn them into biodiesel to run the munibuses or else maybe to lock them into virtual reality cells where they'd spend the rest of their so-called unproductive lives there.
in virtual realities and not on the streets. So very extreme stuff. Yeah, right. Not very mainstream stuff. But...
What does he call for with regard to the way this should translate nationally, right, to the government? Sure. Well, the important thing to understand about Curtis Yarvin is he becomes a favorite thinker of Peter Thiel, the PayPal mafia billionaire who founded Palantir and got even richer off of government surveillance. And
Peter Thiel's House Philosopher
And that entailed taking over the federal government, purging the bureaucracy of anybody who's a Democrat or who believes in democracy, and replacing all federal employees with people who would answer to a sort of CEO dictator type of person, very much mirroring what
Elon Musk is doing with DOGE at this current time. So he extended on that idea in 2012, and then he did it again in 2022. So the idea was to retire all government employees so that you could kind of create an army of loyalists, essentially, to the, quote, CEO or dictator? Yeah, the idea is that bureaucracy and government itself are inherently in the way of a powerful leader who wants to do whatever he pleases and who should be the rightful, uh,
dictator of the system. And so by getting rid of bureaucratic power, getting rid of anybody who doesn't answer to a dictator, that's the only way in Yarvin's belief system to create a government that's more effective and or efficient. But of course, that's the opposite of democracy, the opposite of the American idea of a government that adheres to rules and laws and a certain process to get things done.
So, you know, you have made the connection, of course, to the actions of Doge. And one doesn't have to think that hard. But just to make the connections for me a little bit, is essentially Musk supposed to be the CEO dictator? And if so, then who is President Trump supposed to be in this scenario? Yeah. Well, in 2022, Yarvin updates the idea on his Substack newsletter to something he calls the butterfly revolution. And he says, he writes down,
If Trump gets reelected, then what he should do is install a sort of CEO dictator to carry out this purge of government, to defy the courts and the laws, and to get as far as he can in dismantling the existing institutions of the American public, which
And Trump's role would be to be more like the chairman of the board. So again, this kind of corporate metaphor. So Trump is really the enabler of this CEO dictator who comes in and dismantles the government, I'm assuming, and then gets pardoned or whatever so that he's not responsible for anything he does. And in Yarvin's
This was a way to keep Trump away from most of the mess and allow some other corporate figure to come in and do that. This is pretty much exactly what Elon Musk has been doing at Doge or Dodge is what I prefer to call it since no one really calls anything Doge. And, uh,
Yeah. I mean, it was written down in 2022, and it really seems to be – maybe it's a big coincidence. It seems to be exactly what they're doing now. And when you say also take over institutions besides the federal government, what else? Like the press? The press. Academia has been a major target. The legal system. They're obviously trying to crack down on law firms and scare judges and replace judges.
At the heart of this idea, which some call the dark enlightenment, others call the neo-reactionary movement, others call it the network state, is this cultish idea that tech CEOs, tech billionaires should now be in charge of the world, in control of the world. That they have the money, they have the intelligence, they have the technology, and why should anyone else get to make a decision? And a big part of that is creating what they call parallel institutions.
a parallel government, a parallel media, parallel academia, parallel legal system, even parallel religion, and that those will become the basis of a new order in the world that they will be in charge of. And so we're going to see these attacks on all institutions that are essential to democracy because they want to replace those institutions with new versions that answer to them. So what evidence have you found that they are very connected to Yarvin's work?
Oh, yeah. Well, the connection between Thiel and Jarvin is very clear. It goes back years. Thiel has largely funded his companies and has quoted his works. Mark Andreessen, who's another major player in this Doge thing, calls himself a friend of Jarvin and has quoted him as well. Balaji Srinivasan, who's a major...
thinker behind the network state, former CTO of Coinbase, a former Andreessen Horowitz partner, has written a whole book called The Network State that is largely derived from Yarvin's work. And lately, there's been more media coverage of the fact that, you know, all of these guys, none of them are hiding their connection to Yarvin.
One of the things I think it's important for people to understand about the work I've done in uncovering and excavating some of this stuff is that I didn't get this from secret documents or from insider testimony.
They've put this in podcasts. They've put it in books. They have a whole conference about it once a year. They are very open about this idea, but very few people have paid attention, I think because it sounds like the kind of thing that Internet trolls talk about. The problem is that these Internet trolls have billions of dollars and currently have their fingers around the throat of our government. And how...
Close is Teal to J.D. Vance. And by extension, does that mean that J.D. Vance is also somebody who sort of believes in this ideology?
Oh, definitely. The whole reason this has gone national is because of J.D. Vance. When I started writing about this last year, I was mostly focused on how some of these ideas were manifesting in Bay Area politics. But when J.D. Vance got on the ticket, this kicked it up to a whole new level. To understand J.D. Vance, you have to understand that he is largely a creation of Peter Thiel. At every step of J.D. Vance's career, Peter Thiel has been there funding him.
Vance first met Thiel when Thiel spoke at Yale Law School while Vance was a law student. He wrote him an email expressing his admiration. Peter Thiel invited him to come and visit him in California sometime. A few years later, J.D. Vance is working for one of Peter Thiel's companies, Mithril Capital, here in San Francisco. He wrote his book, Hillbilly Elegy, while working for Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel did a blurb for the book.
When J.D. Vance decided to go back to Ohio and start his own fund, he did so with help from Thiel. When he decided to run for Senate, Thiel spent more money than had ever been spent on a Senate race to get him elected. And when Vance needed to make peace with Trump to get on the ticket, because he had formerly compared Trump to Hitler, it was Thiel who made the peace between them. So
J.D. Vance is largely a creation of Peter Thiel, and it's very important for people to understand that. Why do you think Yarvin's theories have resonated so much with these tech billionaires, these tech elite? Because it wasn't like they were always aligned, say, with Trump and the MAGA right as well. So what is it about this theory that you think has been so captivating? Well,
An important thing to understand is that Yarvin is largely deriving his ideas from other places. To really understand this, you have to go back to a 1997 book called The Sovereign Individual, which basically was one of these dark apocalyptic style books. And it predicted that in the 21st century, the information age would underpin.
undermine the existing economy and existing nation states, that the information age would kill lots of jobs and result in a lot of violence and chaos, and would also lead to the rise of a so-called cognitive elite, people who are able to become wealthy off of technology and don't need traditional jobs to survive. And it would be their mission to escape from existing countries using something called cyber currency, basically crypto, which would allow them to evade taxation and evade government authoritative
and create their own nations that they would rule over in this post-democracy order brought about by the information age. When you see what Yarvin has written, when you see what Balaji Srinivasan has written in his book, The Network State, it's largely based on that core idea. So,
You have a group of very wealthy men who have pretty much an apocalyptic idea of what the future is. And they're preparing for that apocalyptic future or they perceive themselves to be doing that by attempting to bring into the world the reality that we see in the Sovereign Individual book or that we largely see in science fiction where there's all these dystopian societies that are
high technology, but where inequality and injustice have not been solved. And so I think that's an important thing for people to understand. These ideas sound crazy when you first hear them. They sounded
very unhinged to me, and I didn't pay attention to them at first. But you have to understand that these are very wealthy men with very strange and scary ideas, and they seriously believe in them. And it sounds like they also have a very high opinion of their own abilities. Oh, definitely. They believe they are the messiahs of the new age and that they are destined to rule the universe and make the human species multi-planetary. And that's not even, again, that's not my analysis. You can go see the tweets where they've said this kind of stuff. So
Well, let me ask listeners, how does this sound to you? What is your reaction to it? What questions do you have about it? Have you encountered these ideas, especially if you have worked in the tech industry or companies that have been supported by or led by some of the people that Gil is talking about?
You can email forum at kqed.org. You can find us on Blue Sky Facebook, Instagram, or threads at kqedforum. You can call us at 866-733-6786. 866-733-6786. I always kind of laugh when we have these conversations and we're using the very products. But anyway, Noel on Discord writes...
Trump version 1.0 was destructive, but not in a methodical way. We need to learn about their methods, not act surprised, dust ourselves off and find ways to fight this in whatever way we can. We'll have more with Gil Duran after the break. Stay with us. I'm Mina Kim.
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Welcome back to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're looking this hour at the ideologies that drive the tech right and their effort to remake technology.
or in some people's view, unmake the federal government. We're talking about it with Gil Duran, a journalist who produces a newsletter covering the tech industry called The Nerd Reich. Gil's also spent over a decade in California politics or more, serving as chief communications strategist for Governor Jerry Brown and working with Senator Dianne Feinstein, a former editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee and the San Francisco Examiner.
And listeners, you are sharing your questions and thoughts about the nerd, I'm sorry, about the ideologies that are driving the tech right, a group that could also be called the nerd right, I guess, according to Gil. This listener asks, how much of this plan's execution is predicated on the whims of Trump? Is there any possibility that Trump could grow tired of these advisors and get rid of them like a child who grows tired of playing with his toys or has the techno authoritarian train already left the station?
So I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Trump is not necessarily a follower of Curtis Yarvin or has read The Sovereign Individual. So, yeah, what do you think about this listener's question with regard to how much of this is predicated on the whims of Trump?
Well, I think Trump has for the most part right now been bought off. Trump's in it for the money and these guys have plenty of it. This administration started with the launch of a meme coin that stole like billions of dollars from regular people and put a lot of money in a very few pockets. And it was almost like no one paid attention to that scandal the following week. And in previous eras, this would have been the end of a presidency, right? And, uh,
So I think Trump is completely in partnership with these guys. He may not have the ideology, but as long as Elon and these guys are going to spend billions of dollars and create all of these business opportunities for his family, I think he's all in. There is a problem, though, because this is becoming very unpopular very quickly. The polls are diving. Elon Musk is becoming one of the most despised politicians.
men in the country. He's threatening Social Security. He's firing veterans. You've got Republicans showing up to town halls to yell at their absentee representatives in early 2025. This is a political disaster in many ways. So I think there will be some political tension between the Republican establishment and these tech broligarchs
Because they're breaking all the rules of politics and don't really seem to care about the future. And in politics, you really got to care about the next election and the election after that. That's the name of the game. Before the break, I was mentioning the fact that these tech elites weren't always so aligned with the right or MAGA and so on. What led to that movement to Trump and MAGA?
Well, I think they got very, very rich. And there is a tendency of people who get very, very rich, not always, but in general, to become more and more right wing because they don't want to pay taxes and they feel exceptional and they feel superior. And I think what happened with Trump, remember, they tried to get onto the Ron DeSantis train. They tried to run Vivek Ramaswamy. Trump just had the charisma and the dominance, despite all of his problems and all of his convictions, to become the nominee.
And so I think it was a partnership of convenience to some part. You have a vehicle here. I compare it to this tech authoritarianism is the parasite and MAGA is the host. And so they found a way to sort of get in there with Trump and clearly make a deal where Elon will run roughshod over the government while Trump plays golf and tweets. And I think that is very much what we see playing out here.
I think they saw an opportunity, right? It's a very opportunistic play and an opportunity to go as far as they can with a candidate who has been able to openly violate the law and not pay any political consequence for it. What is the end game? Because it sounds like...
So far, I'm not really seeing one where it will actually make the world a better place or something for the common good. I'm not hearing you say that, which is often how people or at least people use that to justify the ideology that they're promoting. Yeah, this is not an ideology where the world is a better place for the majority of people.
It's a place where the world is a better place for tech billionaires. You don't make the world a better place by getting rid of social security, which is crucial to the survival of millions and millions of Americans. This is very much, again, and I know it's a hard thing to hear, these guys have an apocalyptic vision of the future where countries like the United States no longer exist and we are at the mercy and the whims of tech billionaires. If you read The Sovereign Individual, if you go in
I hate to recommend this, go and read the writings of Curtis Yarvin. You will see laid out very clearly the vision that these people have
of the world. They talk about it, they brag about it, and I think they are very much trying to bring that world about. The world that these men want, and you can see this in the news every day, is a world in which this country is a lot weaker and is no longer the big defender of democracy and freedom in the world. They very much want a world in which autocracies like Russia and like China are the model of governance, and they want that for the United States because that's the way that they will have maximum power.
Let me go to caller Judy in San Jose. Hi, Judy, you're on. Good morning, Nina and Mr. Duran. My question is, what parallels would you draw between the ideology of Peter Thiel as adopted by Vance and the so-called philosophy articulated in the series of novels by Ayn Rand? Thanks. Definitely.
That's definitely one of the roots of the ideology. This idea in Ayn Rand, there's a place called Galt's Gulch where all the elites of the world, elite capitalists go to hide out while the rest of the world is in chaos. And this starts out, I think people like Thiel, they start out as libertarians, this idea that they don't need the government and that they would do better without it and be able to achieve more without government.
But I think a lot of media calls these guys libertarians, but that's not correct because Peter Thiel is largely a billionaire off of government surveillance contracts. And you can't be a libertarian and get rich off of government contracts or on surveilling your fellow citizens when you libertarians are in support of privacy from government intrusion. So I think there's a root there of that philosophy. I often get
Also comparisons to other science fiction books like Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. We see these ideas recurring a lot in science fiction and other kinds of literature because they are fantastical ideas of what the future might be. They're very dystopian in that way. Let me go to caller Sarah and Marin. Hi, Sarah, you're on. Hi.
Hello, and thank you so much for this program. I'm wondering, what is the antidote to this distorted philosophy, distorted scheme, twisted view of how our future should look? How do we antidote it? How do we stop it from happening and create something that will be better for all beings? Jill, thanks, Sarah.
Well, number one, I think we're learning a big lesson here, which is that we can have democracy or we can have billionaires, but we can't have both. And I think that's a reckoning we're going to have to have in our society. And I think the next few years are really going to prove to the American people how dangerous it is when we have a system that can be largely corrupted by money and we have people with infinite money. So that's one big problem we're going to have to solve on a systemic level.
On a more urgent, immediate level, I think part of my job is to tell people what's going on and to expose the ideological structure of this thing because people can't respond if they don't know what's going on. And this is largely a narrative people haven't heard in the media. And I find when people do understand it and do do some of the research and see it, then they're a bit more urgently activated about
to take action. And I think we're going to see this awareness spread through the country. And I think that's the first step is for people to be aware of what's going on. If people don't know what's happening, they cannot respond to it. Some of the actions that we've seen feel like they also have underpinnings in Project 2025, or some of the policy prescriptions of Project 2025 seem to suggest some of the things that we're seeing. Is there a connection there?
Oh, absolutely. In fact, a lot of people forget this. With the Heritage Foundation?
And it was a joint conference between SF Tech VCs.
and the Heritage Foundation. In fact, there was a special guest who wasn't announced to the last minute, and it was Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, of Project 2025. So here was in September of 2024, a conference between these two parties. And I think it's really clear that they have found, at least temporarily, some great alignment and are trying to push forward on their common goals under the MAGA banner.
So besides cyber currency, as was brought up in The Sovereign Individual, the book, what are the other tools that are going to be used to create this? Is AI just a huge part of this, Gil? AI is a big part of it. Right now, we're going to see them try to replace most of the people in our government with Elon's AI systems. You know, part of the idea here is that AI will do a much better job of running the world and these guys will be in control of AI.
There are some of their theorists and analysts talking about this very openly. Crypto, you know, a big goal of this is to undermine the power of the dollar and make sure that the tech bros are now in charge of monetary policy via cryptocurrencies that they're largely invested in and control. We've already seen how social media has an outsized impact on our politics as a weapon of disinformation. That was largely why Elon Musk bought crypto.
and turned it into X, which has largely become an amplifier for his voice and the voices of people who agree with him. Well, he has kind of hidden the voices or kicked people off of Twitter if he disagrees with them all under the banner of so-called free speech. I know personally, I was kicked off of Twitter for eight months after Elon took over. So I had that lesson in a very visceral way. And so there are multiple levels of technology that they're using, but I'd say AI and crypto are the main ones.
along with social media or anything they can use to spread disinformation and unreality to continue to polarize and supercharge their political movement.
Let me go to caller Amelia in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi, Amelia. Thanks for calling. Hello. I was wondering what with the recent news, the defeat of Brad Schimel after Elon Musk threw so much weight behind him in the election. I'm wondering if you're seeing any potential cracks that could emerge between these techno bros and the MAGA movement.
Yeah, I think this alliance is highly vulnerable to disruption. And it's sad that we don't have an actual opposition party in this country anymore because you could make a lot of hay out of all the tensions and vulnerabilities that do exist. As we saw last night in Wisconsin, Elon Musk can be defeated.
He makes some very bad choices and his money doesn't always win. And we need to find ways to make people feel their own power and understand that this is still a government of, by, and for the people, not of, by, and for the billionaires. And I think Wisconsin and the election last night is an important milestone because once people realize that if we fight, we win, I think it's the billionaires who need to start getting a bit nervous about what's going to happen in the future.
There already have been reports of, you know, potential fissures between the elite tech right and the populist right with Steve Bannon. Can you talk about that? What are some of the disagreements there?
Sure. Sadly, Steve Bannon, whom I despise, has been the only person really raising these issues to a large audience. He's pointing out all the ways in which the tech elites, these billionaires, have some very weird ideas about the future. For instance, transhumanism is something he focuses on a lot. A lot of these guys believe that we need to just merge our bodies with computers and live forever and kind of basically made up our brains with AI. And they have all these ideas that would probably really scare a lot of
swing voters, centrists in the middle part of the country, if they are more aware of these things. Some of these guys have done things like inject the blood plasma of younger people into their own bodies in an effort to be younger and live longer. I mean, there's a lot of weirdness there and only Bannon has been talking about it. So there is a schism on the right. And as more people, especially I think people on the religious right, find out who these guys are and what they believe in
There's a lot of exploitable material there that, again, if there were something like a Democratic Party that was opposing the Republican Party, that you could really emphasize to drive a wedge between especially swing voters.
and the MAGA base. I think there are some people in the MAGA base who are just not going to believe any of this stuff, but I think there are a lot of people now seeing that it's kind of weird that all these billionaires show up, start dismantling our government, threatening to cut off our grandmothers and grandfathers from their social security and have all these weird beliefs that are things we've never heard of before. So I think there's a lot of material there. People start tuning in, and Wisconsin is an important milestone.
This is new Ross writes, Yarvin is a smirking intellectual fantasist and an unearnest provocateur. Speaking of his ideas as quote theories is to suggest comic books are starting points for social restructuring. Another listener asks, so what is Curtis Yarvin writing about now? Does he feel that the government is on track with his ideas? What is he predicting comes next? First, I agree with the person who said it's like a comic book. The problem is that very powerful billionaires take this guy seriously.
If it weren't for these billionaires, he'd be just an anonymous internet troll. He wouldn't have to care about what he thinks. And that's the scary part. These serious men with tons of money, with massive government contracts and access to classified intelligence take Curtis Yarvin seriously. And that's why I take him seriously and take these men very seriously. On the second part, Yarvin actually is very sad right now.
Jarvin is disappointed and Jarvin thinks that Elon's going to blow it. And he is in his latest 7,000 word screed trying to back away from it and say that it's going to fail and that they're not doing it right. Basically, they're not being authoritarian enough and they're not rebuilding these new government structures as quickly as they're dismantling them. So I take some joy in knowing that Curtis Jarvin is not enjoying his revolution and he thinks it's going to fail. And I've seen that analysis from other pro-
network state dark enlightenment types, this fear that Elon's volatility as a human being is going to blow the whole thing to pieces. Clifton writes, Gil keeps saying it's important to remember, and I'd like to add that the history of right-wing government influence in Silicon Valley is not new at all, but goes way back for decades and is detailed very well in Margaret O'Mara's book, The Code, and
Can he comment on that more? You have commented on how this is a new form, but the ideas are not new, Gil. Oh, definitely. I'd say Malcolm Harris' Palo Alto talks about the right-wing strain through Silicon Valley. You know, there was this –
during the 90s and part of the 80s and 2000s that tech was kind of fun, was going to make our life cool, all these nice products, connecting us, allowing us to buy stuff online. And for a long time, it seemed non-threatening. Remember, Google had the don't be evil slogan and they were kind of padding around their crocks, building playgrounds for their employees and bespoke lunches and free kombucha on tap. So there was this sort of harmless vibe that there seemed to be from Silicon Valley.
But I think there has always been a certain sort of anti-government lean to a lot of the Silicon Valley movement, this idea that we're going to create structures outside of government. And part of those had kind of a left-coded idea, the idea of getting out of –
authoritarian society evading bad governments in the future there were times when these ideas seemed like something people on the left could uh be a part of or were into but what's happened is these guys became super rich and as they've become super super super rich they've gone far far far to the right uh and they're kind of pulling others now with them there's been this effort to recruit others into the more right-wing sphere people including democrats um
To some degree, well, you had people like –
You've seen some of these Silicon Valley guys who've gone from supporting Biden or Kamala Harris, people like Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz, to now supporting Trump. And if you know anything about ideology in the brain, you don't just change your ideological beliefs overnight. That's a very, very, very hard thing to do. So I think these guys think, oh, this is going to win. Let's get on this rocket ship with Trump and Teal and Elon and live in the new world after that. And I do think that there's been an effort now to also recruit –
to this more right-wing belief system without them fully understanding what it is that they're doing. And that was really what kind of started my interest here in San Francisco. You know, I didn't set out to write about this topic. I fell into it by trying to figure out what was happening in Northern California politics in 2022. We're talking with Gil Duran, who...
Perdue's is a newsletter calling the tech industry the nerd Reich. He's a journalist who's also worked in politics for a long time and also in the press. We're looking at the ideologies that drive the effort to remake or unmake the federal government, the people and ideas that are inspiring some Silicon Valley CEOs or members of the tech elite to realign themselves with President Trump.
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Welcome back to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking this hour about the ideological underpinnings of some of the actions that we're seeing by tech elites in the federal government, Elon Musk, for example, but also the influence of Peter Thiel, David Sachs, Marc Andreessen and others.
And listeners, you are joining the conversation that we're having with Gil Duran about it. He writes about this on his newsletter called The Nerd Reich, a freelance journalist and also someone who has worked in politics and media for a long time. This listener writes, does this connect with the California forever planned city near Fairfield?
So one name that you mentioned earlier, Gil, that we haven't really talked about as much but I want to now is Balaji Sreenivasan, another disciple of the sovereign individual, as you say, but he also has a book called The Network State. So tell us about him and what he believes. Well, Balaji Sreenivasan worked for Andreessen Horowitz and was also the chief technology officer of Coinbase.
And before that, all the way back in 2013, he gave a speech at Y Combinator in which he basically called for Silicon Valley to secede from the United States and to go start their own country and take all of their wealth and all of their brainpower and leave the United States. And the New York Times actually wrote a story about this weird call for secession. And he continues to develop these ideas over the next decade and in 2020 released a book called
2022, actually, called The Network State, How to Start a New Country. And this book lays out all the reasons why American democracy is an outdated system and why it needs to be replaced by new tech forms of governance. And there are two ways to do that. One is to leave the country, buy a territory, and create your own sovereign state or city. You can do that within a country or by leaving a country.
And the other way is to take over existing governments and convert them into tech-controlled governments. And so that's the basic idea of Balaji Sreenivasan and the network state. And in a podcast interview last year, he laid out this whole vision for a future San Francisco.
in which tech-aligned citizens would don gray uniforms and they would purge the blues, meaning Democrats, from entire sectors of the city where they would no longer be allowed. And they would also erect statues to remind people of how bad the Democrats were and show movies in the theaters reminding people of the horrors of blue democratic governance and laid out this entire –
bizarre kind of fascistic scenario and it would culminate when they had enough people in the so-called gray tribe, the tech-controlled political party, that they would, with the police and Andoril drones flying overhead, have a massive gray pride march through the streets of San Francisco to express their dominance. So this is some of the thinking of Baljit Srinivasan, who people like Marc Andreessen and Sam Altman and others consider a genius with great ideas.
And my interest in this ideology started with SF Politics, this effort by tech bros to sort of take over City Hall, but also by the California Forever Project. And I was pretty much ignoring the California Forever Project. I knew it was kind of this weird thing they're trying to do. But it wasn't until I read a book by a historian named Quinn Slobodian called Crack Up Capitalism, Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy, that
that I understood the idea there. There is this idea, it isn't just from Balaji or Yarvin, that goes back decades, if not centuries, for wealthy people to find a way to exit society and create their own sort of utopian countries that they control. And in that book, Crack Up Capitalism, I found Balaji and this whole network state ideology.
And there had been activists in San Francisco, in particular one named Emily Mills, who had been trying to tell me about this and trying to tell the world about this on Twitter. And I had largely ignored it because it sounded really weird. But when I read it in this book by a Wellesley historian, I was like, wait, this is that thing they're talking about. And that's when I took a deep dive into this subject. And my first story that I wrote for the New Republic, I wrote a five-piece story.
series last year on this stuff was about California Forever and how it connects to this idea of creating new so-called network states that you find in Balaji Srinivasan's book. And Balaji Srinivasan has specifically said that California Forever is a part of this ideology. You also say that there are others in the world, one in Honduras? Yeah, in Honduras, there's a
Network state tech controlled city called Prospera, which was created during a period of authoritarian rule in Honduras and is invested in by people like Peter Thiel, who has a company called Pronomos Capital, which is investing in these kinds of projects all over the world.
They're also trying to build a city somewhere in the Mediterranean called Praxis. That would be like a city of a half million people, all techies who would live under their own rules. Although now there's been talk of moving the location of Praxis from the Mediterranean to Greenland, which Trump keeps threatening to invade or take over or take control of in some way. There's also talk, you know, in 2024, Trump had in his agenda a plan for something he calls so-called freedom cities.
which are these 10 new charter cities that would be built on federal land all around the United States. Now, the newspapers have mentioned that Trump plans to build freedom cities, but no one has explained what that means, where the idea comes from, or why we need them. And one of the locations of one of these freedom cities, apparently, is going to be the Presidio, where they've been threatening now to build a new city, a new tech-controlled charter city in the Presidio. Again,
A couple of headlines, very little explanation of what all of this means. But currently, according to Wired, there are these connected network state people, people connected to Peter Thiel and Pronomos Capital attempting to lobby Congress to pass legislation to enable the creation of these cities around the country. So I think the freedom cities, which are really –
Anti-freedom city is a very Orwellian name for what would essentially be a corporate controlled city is going to be the way that most Americans start to realize what this idea is really all about. So then you connect Trump's imperial ambitions to this. Again, I don't see it being a reader of the network state, but.
Well, no, I don't think he reads. I think that he's taking orders largely from some of these guys. That's their idea to put the to put their network state there. Right. He's been fantasizing about Greenland for a long time. Everybody knows people. They want Greenland for the the resources that are their resources that are important to there's natural resources in Greenland. It's a strategic location because it's close to the Arctic, which is thawing out and is
going to be strategically important in the future for military and economic reasons. But now you've got the CEO of Peter Thiel's Praxis project openly declaring that they're going to build their city in Greenland instead of there, right? So they're sort of tacking on to these existing ideas and making it about their thing. And Peter Thiel's seasteading, what is an outgrowth of this idea? Yeah.
Well, the original idea back in the early 21st century was something called seasteading, which was they were going to create these weird little countries out on ships in the sea, in international waters, or on abandoned oil rigs. And Peter Thiel invested money to investigate this idea. There was something called the Seasteading Institute Institute.
But turns out nobody wants to live out on a rusted oil rig at sea or be trapped on a boat their whole life. That kind of defeats the point of being a human being and being free. And so this idea went from the sea back to the land and toward using tech wealth to seize power and seize land in existing countries. This is Nora Bluesky writes, I'm so glad to hear your guest on the air. It helps make sense of what we're seeing and how imperative it is for us to push back against it.
Do you ever or did you ever wonder, Gil, if it was as organized, as ideologically connected to some of these theories and ideas and not just driven by just self-interest so much? Do you know what I mean? Like that that.
That connection and that methodology and so forth was as tightly connected to these ideologies as you feel like they are now. Because I could also see an argument where, you know, yes, this is connected, but it's not necessarily, you know, as closely connected.
or lined up to be a blueprint or a playbook per se. I'm wondering if you ever had that thought as you've been going through this process of connecting the ideologies to the actions that we're seeing. Sure. I'm a pretty skeptical person and I'm a pretty rational guy. I advise some of California's top politicians and mostly winning campaigns that had a big effect on the state. So I come from a very solid background in that way.
And these ideas sounded really crazy to me at first. And I suppose it's all a big coincidence that everything they've been talking about for years is exactly what we're reading about in the newspapers today. That's a possibility that it's all coincidental. But I'm kind of –
The degree to which they are ignoring their sinking poll numbers and the diving stock market doesn't make any sense politically. This is the logic of a suicide bomber when you go into something and you don't care what happens. So I think they're trying to do the thing. Because in part, the ideology does expect pain and some kind of a rebellion in response to it. Yeah, the ideology expects the collapse of the United States and other nations like it.
And a big pushback by people who are against it, I guess, is what I'm saying. Yeah. Part of the idea is that there will be when all the jobs get taken away by technology, there will be violence and chaos and crime because people won't have a way to make a living anymore. And you can't just tell someone to go get a job. And so they had to prepare to be in these sort of bunker silo societies where they're safe from those consequences, the consequences of the technology that they are pushing to create.
Right. And one of the things that interests me about San Francisco, where a lot of these tech bros like Gary Tan love to screech about crime, even though crime is actually at historic lows in recent years, is that their own little radical cognitive elite Bible predicts this massive surge in crime in the 21st century. And so why are you howling about crime when when that's exactly the chaos, you know, is coming because we're going to the social system is.
The social welfare system is the thing they're trying to dismantle right now. And what happens when that no longer exists? Well, it's going to get pretty bad. And that is very much the future they see. So when I see them wantonly dismantling government and ignoring the polls and ignoring the market's gyrations, now it seems like analysts think we're headed toward a recession. When in politics do you see someone just blithely speeding in that direction?
The opposite is true. So I think they're pretty extreme and I think they're pretty dedicated. And again, perhaps it could be coincidental that it sounds like what they're doing, but I really think we're in a very dangerous spot right now. And I don't think they're going to stop unless the people stop them. This is Nir Weitz. Please describe the ideological relation of the far-right tech CEOs to the Christian right.
Well, you're starting to see more of a movement of tech bros to talk about their own religion and to use religious terms. Peter Till in particular likes to use religious terms to describe his – what he calls his political theology. And I think what they have in common – and I do a lot of work with George Lakoff, the cognitive scientist, the author of Don't Think of an Elephant. And here's what they have in common mainly. They believe in a world where white, rich people
Christian males are at the top of the social hierarchy forever. That's a basic belief of conservative thought, this hierarchical worldview. And I think they have those things in common. Beneath that, there are many differences, but I think that they have aligned with the Christian right wholeheartedly.
on those particular questions at this time. And we see, you know, now they're against abortion rights and they're pro-natalists and they want everybody to be breeding, at least they want them to be breeding white babies. And that's another thing they have in alignment with the right. They are scapegoating and demonizing trans people, another way in which they can align with the Christian right. So they've picked certain elements where they're aligning with them
But I think the main ones are that hierarchical worldview where they get to be on the top of the hierarchy. Some of what you're describing sounds like the alt-right as well. I guess it's become sort of the same thing. Yeah, it's kind of all the same thing now, right? It's all been pulled further into the weirdness. Let me remind listeners, you are listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Let me go to David in San Francisco. Hi, David. You're on.
Oh, hi. I flashed on an idea. We've certainly got to do asset forfeiture of these people. And it's funny, as he's been describing this, it reminds me of famous King Leopold of a century ago and how Mussolini was so jealous of King Leopold for being able to buck the social contract.
The king is supposed to look out for every sparrow. A king is supposed to look out for his subjects. But King Leopold, when he took over the Belgian Congo, he intentionally made sure that the people there were not considered citizens and that he didn't have to look out for them.
And that created jealousy with Mussolini, who created the corporate state where the corporations have no duty to look out for anyone else. Their duty is only to their shareholders. So asset forfeiture seems like something that we need to do to these people. And it flashed on an idea, famous old law of Moses, Jubilee. So I'll end with the phrase AI Institute Jubilee.
David, thanks. Do you have any thoughts, Gil? Well, I'm not into any really particular policy prescriptions yet, but I do think we're seeing the impact that the amassing of this tremendous amount of wealth is going to have on our democracy. And it was Louis Brandeis, the Supreme Court justice, who said we can either have vast concentrations of wealth in this country or we can have democracy, but we can't have both. Let me go next to caller Rob in San Francisco. Hi, Rob. You're on.
Thank you. Wow, this is quite the show. I'm wondering if these tech guys who seem to be very high on themselves have planned well enough with their bunkers that I know they're building, because I've read a lot of stories about it's kind of its own little cottage industry. Are they going to be protected well enough
from what all the guns in this country can do. I mean, look what happened with Luigi Mangione. I mean, he took it upon himself to go after what he saw as a great injustice of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. What's to say that people that have the same idea don't go after all these tech bro guys that are taking down the country?
Gil, what do you think? I mean, will this intense people enough where we could see violence? Well, I don't think we need guns. I think we need to vote. I think we need to take back the power in this country. This was a one-point election.
Right. A lot of people stayed home. And I think this is going to wake them up to the fact that you can't stay home. We have to realize that there is a group of people who are avidly working against the public good and against the welfare and well-being of the majority. And I think we can take care of that through the democratic structures that we have.
I don't think these guys have fully thought this out. I don't think they realize, having been in politics myself, what it's going to feel like when you see that the majority of people are against you. And I do think this ends with tens of millions of Americans taking to the street on a regular basis to stand against what is an increasingly authoritarian regime in Washington. And I think that it also ends with a bunch of billionaires getting on planes to Moscow at midnight.
Well, Victoria writes, Senator Chris Murphy has said we're sleepwalking into autocracy and that we don't have power in Congress right now. Cory Booker seemed to say the same during his 24-hour speech, and that...
It's now up to the American people. We have flooded the phone lines, quit Amazon Prime and Whole Foods, stopped buying Teslas, but not yet flooded the streets. This is obviously the next step. And you would say flood the streets. I'm sure Gil in peaceful protest, a listener on Blue Sky writes, every profoundly anti-democratic act that the nerds are doing is right out in the open, but we haven't understood it fully. Thank you to Gil Duran for laying it out. You know, you have already touched on this and,
You know, you can tell me if you have more to add, but people are wondering, you know, additional steps that they feel like they can take now that they have heard about this from you. I mean, do you recommend that we read these books? Do you recommend that we, you know, is there anything else you would add to recommendations to try to push back on this or at least try to rein it in?
Well, I think it's important to understand it, to learn about it, and to tell others about it, to get other people to understand it. Word of mouth is very important. People listen to their peers, to their friends, to their family members. That's where a lot of people get their main political knowledge from. And so I think that's a very important step to take. On the Nerd Reich, I summarize a lot of these works so you don't have to read them yourself. But if you want to, go and read Yarvin. Go and read The Sovereign Individual. You'll understand what these people believe and where they want to take us. Yeah.
Gail Duran, a freelance journalist whose newsletter is The Nerd Reich. Thanks so much for talking with us today. Thanks for having me. And my thanks to listeners for your questions and comments. My thanks to Mark Nieto for producing this segment. You have been listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.
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