Peter Thiel’s Antichrist lectures have been rejected by theologians and mocked by comedians, but he still cannot stop talking about the Antichrist. This week, the billionaire delivered his trademark four-part Antichrist lecture at a private venue within sight of the Vatican.

At the height of his power—with his companies and allies embedded in Trump’s fascist regime and his protégé, JD Vance, a heartbeat from the presidency—Thiel has launched a campaign to herald the Antichrist. He is on an Antichrist world tour, having given his talks in Austin, San Francisco, England, Austria and, now, Rome.

The Vatican was in no mood to play games with the would-be prophet from Palantir. Paolo Benanti, a priest who has advised Pope Francis and Pope Leo on AI and tech ethics, called out Thiel as a “political theologian operating at the very heart of the Silicon Valley ecosystem” and delivered a scathing rebuke of Thiel’s religious delusions:

Thiel’s entire action can thus be read as a prolonged act of heresy against the liberal consensus: a challenge to the very foundations of civil coexistence, which he now considers outdated.

Benanti hit Thiel where it hurts, zooming in on his persistent efforts to pervert religious ideas into justifications for greed, monopoly, and authoritarianism. He exposes Thiel’s obsessive focus on achieving “the pathological radicalization” of “competition, technology, the individual” to argue against democratic society itself.

It’s clear that Benanti has done a deep study of Thiel and knows exactly what the billionaire is up to with all of this Antichrist talk. The priest hits Thiel for weaponizing René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire—the theory that people learn desire by imitating other people—in a demented search for the “perfect algorithmic implementation” of its destructive force. Benanti points to Thiel’s early investment in Facebook as an effort to create “a device designed to amplify and monetize mimetic desire on a planetary scale.”

He also calls out Thiel’s love for The Sovereign Individual, a 1997 book that taught Thiel “to view technology not only as an instrument of profit, but as a tool for managing the decline of liberal democratic institutions.” Benanti further connects Thiel’s ideas to the TESCREAL movement—“philosophies, championed notably by Elon Musk, see technology as the instrument for transcending the biological and social limitations of humanity.” TESCREAL ideologies like transhumanism and longtermism are Silicon Valley’s true religion. Thiel’s Antichrist meditations attempt to put a Christian mask on these ideas, but Benanti argues that Thiel’s vision is structurally pagan.

I’ve written on these same issues in the New Republic and in this newsletter, and they are the subject of my forthcoming book. Now, with a Papal advisor taking Thiel to task, newspapers around the world are writing about Thiel’s Antichrist sermons.

It is easy to mock Thiel’s fascination with the biblical villain, but keep in mind: he wants the attention. Thiel is consciously seeking to position himself as a figure of religious authority, using scripture and philosophy to preach in favor of a capitalism that murders democracy. He clearly wants to recruit people to his cause, perhaps to start a movement. Still, his public Antichrist obsession seems like a miscalculation, since he is not suited for the role of religious teacher.

Thiel is inarticulate and uncharismatic. His florid arguments have the architecture of a conspiracy theory, weaving together random and disconnected elements to make grand assertions. And those assertions—cosmic and sweeping—are more concerning than convincing.

In fact, his speeches usually hint at the idea that he’s not really a believer but rather someone who understands the power of religious ideas. People willing to believe in serious apocalyptic prophecies are likely not inclined to receive them from him.

It would be much wiser for Thiel to pipe down and enjoy the fruits of Trump’s lucrative fascism in strategic silence. He is saying too much, spelling out Silicon Valley’s plan to weaponize religion in a war against democracy.

Perhaps unwittingly, Thiel is confessing Silicon Valley’s sins and sounding an alarm for all the world to hear. But when a billionaire dreams of being a prophet, few things can stop him from trying—not even a wakeup call from the Vatican.

• Read Benanti’s full piece: “American Heresy: Should Peter Thiel Be Burned At The Stake?”
• Click here for an English translation.
• New York Times: “Peter Thiel Fears the Antichrist Is Coming. In Rome, Some Call His View Heresy.”
• Reuters: Thiel’s secretive Rome conference draws Church attention

Curtis Yarvin has befriended Alexander Soros, son of George Soros and chair of the Open Society Foundation, at a fancy conference in southern Bavaria.

A new profile of Yarvin in the German publication Die Zeit captures Yarvin guzzling wine (and weeping, as he has a habit of doing lately) at an intellectual confab for “distinguished political thinkers” at a five-star Schloss Elmau spa and hotel in February.

Yarvin described Soros as “actually smart,” while Soros described Yarvin as “very nice.” On Saturday, Yarvin posted pictures of himself with Soros, embracing and smiling like the best of friends.

It’s a strange sight—the son of the man long credited as liberalism’s greatest patron, arm in arm with one of today’s leading architects of neofascism. But Yarvin has always had a talent for cultivating men with more money than sense. More on that in a moment.

While researching my book on tech fascism, I came across an especially disturbing podcast interview with Yarvin. During an appearance on the Anglofuturist podcast last year, he swilled beer and laid out a dehumanizing and dystopian vision for Africa:

How should Africa be governed? First, it has to be re-governed. First, you know, the anarchy has to be eliminated, there has to be...Imagine a futurist Africa, Africa in 2100 and there’s a computer...that knows how many Africans there are, down to a single digit, where they are in terms of position—just the way, you know, if you’re, like, a rancher in Wyoming, you know where all your cattle are thanks to modern whatever—you know where all these people are, you know what they’re doing and your goal is for them to thrive as human beings without breeding too much. Like, you know, what a vision right? You know, like, imagine restoring order to South Africa. You don’t need to make South Africa all white to restore order to South Africa. You just need governance.

(Note: The YouTube transcript says “without breathing too much,” but I believe Yarvin actually says “breeding,” which makes more sense in this context. In any case, it’s a distinction without a difference.)

The racism is in-your-face and designed to provoke outrage. But notice the tech fascist structure underneath it: Africans compared to cattle, their movements tracked by computer, their reproduction managed by an external authority. Their human dignity and sovereignty dissolved into what Yarvin blandly describes as “governance.” It’s a fascist colonial fantasy—Yarvin calls it “neocolonialism”—in its purest, most technocratic form.

He suggested another target for the same treatment: West Oakland. His “neocolonialism” solution for the historically Black neighborhood entails allowing the Chinese government to impose an authoritarian surveillance regime:

So we basically cede West Oakland and it becomes extraterritorial under Chinese law. And then Chinese like police, you know how in Beijing they have the police officers with like the white gloves... and so, basically, like, if there's any sort of — you know—it’s under Chinese law, enforced by Chinese security forces—so if there’s any bad bad behavior and then, you know, the guys in white gloves are like they blow the [whistle] and they're like right you know like jaywalking right. I mean first of all anything involving both Asians and African-Americans is inherently amusing, number one fact, and it’s just how it is I don’t make the rules...

Yarvin imagined a future West Oakland where he could use an app to summon a drone armed with a megaphone to yell at people considered bothersome (here, he appeared to do a racist imitation of a Chinese voice).

“And that’s the first step, and if there’s no compliance with these orders in Chinese—which maybe the guy doesn’t understand—I think he’ll learn to understand them,” Yarvin said, calling the situation a “win win” and a model for future governance.

Yarvin spoke these words as USAID cuts were devastating global health in the poorest countries of Africa. Estimates from public health researchers suggest the resulting death toll could reach at least 14 million by 2030, concentrated heavily in sub-Saharan Africa—many of them children under five. Yarvin has advocated gutting USAID for decades.

As USAID cuts kill the continent's poorest and most vulnerable, Silicon Valley’s venture capital class is moving in. Elon Musk is aggressively expanding Starlink across Africa—using his leverage inside the Trump administration to pressure sovereign governments into opening their markets to him. He helped kill the foreign aid and now he’s peddling satellite internet. Meanwhile, multiple tech-funded “Network State” projects are being pushed in Africa.

Yarvin says in public what others can only say in private, and he has a talent for introducing disturbing scenarios that later become reality. Long before DOGE, Yarvin imagined a presidential administration that would install a CEO to gut the federal bureaucracy and dismantle USAID. Many shocking aspects of our current situation can be traced back to his blogs. So when Yarvin speaks of colonizing Africa with surveillance and eugenics, we should pay attention, because Yarvin—clown, court jester, guru, svengali—has a talent for cultivating billionaires. People like Peter Thiel, JD Vance, and Marc Andreessen consider him a genius. Now, he’s cozied up with Alexander Soros.

Which makes his current decline worth noting, with caution.

It’s 2026. Trump is sinking in the polls and Republicans are likely headed to a crushing defeat in the midterms. The CEO-dictator system Yarvin prescribed collapsed spectacularly when Elon Musk flamed out and turned on Trump. The president’s hunger for crypto corruption currently seems larger than his desire for a risky overnight coup that could end in prison or death for all involved.

And Yarvin cannot stop crying.

The Die Zeit piece captures him weeping at the spa in Bavaria, swirling wine in a glass, ordering multiple rounds of Scotch on a New York Times reporter’s tab. This is not a new habit. He has bawled in the New Yorker and during podcast interviews. His tears have become more important than his words.

To some degree, Yarvin’s gaudy racist fantasies of fascist surveillance and control over Black people seem like a desperate cry for attention. His image as a serious political influencer has suffered major damage over the past year as multiple journalism profiles have exposed him as a long-winded bore prone to incoherent monologues and wine weeping. He complains that Trump isn’t being authoritarian enough and worries he may need to flee the country if Democrats retake power. Many of his fellow right-wing provocateurs have turned on him, pelting him with online mockery and scorn.

His fifteen minutes of fame seem to be expiring, and so he escalates to prolong the interest. Africans as cattle, Chinese drones in West Oakland—his sci-fi racist taunts sound like something an intellectually precocious middle schooler would think up.

Yet, even in this diminished stage of his celebrity, he keeps finding fans among the billionaire class.

“Generally, the people at the top aren’t sociopaths either,” Yarvin wrote in response to one of my comments about his appearance in Bavaria. “They’re just inside a giant machine they didn’t create. They see everything through the machine’s screen... But once you allow for this—and they for the reverse—they’re easy to get along with.”

These words were accompanied by his cuddly photos with Soros, which Yarvin said he had posted “with permission lol.”

Quick Update

I have been busy revising The Nerd Reich book, so I haven’t been posting as much as usual. A book is hard work! But we have some amazing new podcast episodes coming soon on subjects like Jeffrey Epstein, Bitcoin, and Palantir. Stay tuned.

If you’re planning to join the live conversation with Jacob Silverman tomorrow (Friday, February 13 at 12 p.m. PST), here’s the link to join at that time. You should be able to join without a passcode just by clicking the link. But if it asks for a passcode, it is 111. If there is a glitch of any kind, I’ll send an update, but hopefully the link works for everyone. See you tomorrow!

Palantir Power Pollutes Politics

Yesterday, I joined Wajahat Ali to discuss Silicon Valley’s effort to buy the California governor’s office by funding the candidacy of San José Mayor Matt Mahan, a right-leaning Democrat whose supporters include Trump-loving Palantir billionaire Joe Lonsdale. Click below to listen to our conversation about how the tech oligarchs behind Trump are also working to co-opt the Democratic Party.

In December, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale called for public hangings in the United States. The Texas-based billionaire, a longtime associate of Peter Thiel, is a major Trump supporter who believes the 2020 election was stolen and the “deep state” is responsible for the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol.

So, why is Lonsdale—who says public executions will bring back “masculine leadership”—funding a Democratic candidate in the California governor's race? New public filings reveal that Lonsdale has given the maximum donation of $78,400 to a little-known California politician named Matt Mahan. (That’s more than he donated to Steve Hilton, a right-wing former Fox host also running for governor.)

Mahan, currently serving his first term as mayor of San José, made a late entry into the crowded governor’s race in January. He’s polling in the single digits and, historically, it’s pretty hard for anyone to go directly from a mayor’s office to the governor's office. The last mayor to pull it off was James “Sunny Jim” Rolph, who went from San Francisco City Hall to the governor's office in 1931—and later became infamous for endorsing the public lynching of two men by a mob in San José. Nearly a century later, a San José mayor wants to make the same leap, bankrolled by a billionaire who wants to bring back public hangings. History does weirdly rhyme sometimes...but, I digress.

Mahan’s chances appear slim, but he has a secret weapon: he worked in tech and has the backing of many of the same tech oligarchs, like Lonsdale and Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who now stand behind Donald Trump. Also backing Mahan: Y Combinator president Garry Tan, a Palantir alumnus (he claims to have created the company’s logo) and a member of the Network State cult, which hopes to replace democratic nations with tech-run dystopias. In January 2024, Tan got drunk and tweeted “die slow motherfuckers” at seven members of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors in a tirade that triggered actual death threats against them.

As I wrote in the New Republic at the time, Tan is spearheading a tech-funded campaign to seize control of San Francisco’s government, using what he calls a “parallel political machine” that he bragged about at the 2023 Network State Conference. Like Mahan, Tan is a “Democrat” with nothing much to say about how Trump and his tech billionaire backers—Tan’s friends—are ripping apart American democracy.

Normally, a small-fry mayor with such a thin résumé wouldn’t get much attention in a gubernatorial race. But rumor has it the billionaire oligarchs are willing to put up massive amounts of money to get Mahan elected. The money is already flowing. A Silicon Valley-backed committee just dropped $1.4 million on a Super Bowl ad introducing Mahan to voters, funded by Y Combinator's Michael Seibel and Riot Games co-founder Marc Merrill—and Mahan’s campaign says it raised $7 million in its first week alone. Other Mahan funders include Brian Singerman of Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and David Marcus, a crypto executive “who announced in 2024 that he was ‘crossing the Rubicon’ to back Trump,” according to Politico.

Also chipping in: an executive from Anduril, the Peter Thiel-backed defense tech company that, like Palantir, profits from military and surveillance contracts.

Why are tech oligarchs flooding Mahan with cash? The answer is simple. Mahan, though nominally a member of the Democratic Party, is a puppet of right-wing Silicon Valley interests. He brands himself a “back to basics” candidate, but the basics are familiar: harsh policies to punish the addicted, homeless, and poor, and very little to say about Trump’s fascist regime.

In fact, Mahan has gone out of his way to criticize Governor Gavin Newsom for trolling Trump on social media, suggesting that the governor should only focus on California matters. Most importantly, Mahan opposes a proposed wealth tax for billionaires that a California labor union is working to put on the ballot this year.

In short, Mahan is a perfect “Democrat” for billionaire oligarchs—a candidate cooked up in a venture capital lab. Billionaires love him because he’ll serve them while fighting against any pesky liberal or progressive policies, and the credulous political press will label him a “centrist.” This is a pattern I’ve been exposing: tech billionaires trying to seize political power by funding candidates who answer to them, not voters. In 2026, the Nerd Reich is literally trying to buy the California governor’s office.

Since no California Republican has been elected statewide since Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006, right-wingers have to get creative here. This means funding Democratic candidates who embrace Republican policies and feast on oligarch money.

The strategy carries risks. Public opinion of Silicon Valley billionaires and tech companies—especially Palantir, which is aiding ICE terror raids—is at all-time lows. By gorging on oligarch money, Mahan makes it clear that he’s their agent. This will likely spark a strong reaction from the Democratic voter base and powerful labor unions, which will spring to action to keep the tech billionaires behind Trump from also capturing Sacramento.

“His challenge: He will be tagged as the tech bro candidate at a time when tech bros are increasingly associated as being Trump’s buddies,” wrote Joe Garofoli of the San Francisco Chronicle.

And Mahan will have to answer a simple question on the campaign trail: Why is your campaign being bankrolled by a Trump-supporting Palantir billionaire who wants to bring back public hangings?

This Friday 12 p.m. Pacific (February 13), I'll host a live Zoom conversation with Jacob Silverman, author of Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. Over 60 readers are planning to join so far. The link will go out Thursday. Questions for Jacob (or me)? Please leave them in the comments or email me at gil (at) thenerdreich.com so we can ask them during our Zoom.

Will tech billionaires get rid of democracy by getting rid of people?

In this episode of The Nerd Reich podcast, I talk with renowned historian Quinn Slobodian, author of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism and Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and The Dream Of A World Without Democracy.

Slobodian’s work helped inspire my own, so it was great to interview him. His writing illuminates the extremist ideas underlying billionaire fantasies of “exit” from democracy.

In this episode, we explore:

• The Hong Kong Blueprint: How a colonial relic became the template for 21st-century capitalism.
• Authoritarian Capitalism: Why Silicon Valley elites are obsessed with models of control.
• The Post-Human Zone: Why the future of “sovereignty” might belong to Manhattan-sized data centers, not citizens.

The Octavia Butler Reality: What if future isn't about escaping the “company town,” but fighting to get into one?

Connect with Quinn Slobodian on BlueSky.

Click below to listen:

• Listen to the Nerd Reich podcast on Apple
• Listen to the Nerd Reich podcast on Spotify

Full transcript below

The Billionaire Exit Plan w/ Quinn Slobodian

Transcripts are auto-generated and may contain errors.

Gil Duran: How did we get here? Jeff Bezos owning and destroying the Washington Post; Palmer Luckey calling for a tech city in Guantanamo; Joe Lonsdale dreaming of public executions.

How has so-called tech libertarianism curdled into open authoritarianism?

If you want to understand the dangerous ideas driving Silicon Valley's war on democracy, few people understand it better than Quinn Slobodian. Quinn is a historian at Boston University and his books expose how wealthy elites are working to create a world of capitalism without democracy. His work explains how billionaires are drawing up a road map to exit from democratic nations and create privatized sovereignties where the rich make the rules for everyone.

In today's episode, we talk about what's actually happening with all these network state and freedom city schemes—about whether tech billionaires will really be satisfied with fascist dystopias in Africa, in Greenland, and in the United States, or is their vision even darker? Data centers the size of Manhattan, dark factories, an infrastructure that doesn't need democracy because their future doesn't need people.

I'm Gil Duran, and this is the Nerd Reich podcast.

Gil Duran: Quinn Slobodian, thanks for joining me here on the Nerd Reich podcast.

Quinn Slobodian: Very happy to be here.

Gil Duran: I tell everybody who's curious about my work that they should really read yours, because your work played a big role in getting me to take a deeper look at these ideologies coming out of tech and Silicon Valley, these ideas of wealthy elites who want to exit from democracy and society. I was recently going through Crack-Up Capitalism again, and it was mind-blowing to me how much that you talk about in that book you can see all around us now happening. So while you're waiting for my book to come out, read Crack-Up Capitalism, because it very much is born out of the work Quinn Slobodian has been doing for a very long time.

Your work illuminates the ideology of exit, of wealthy people who wish to escape taxes, regulation, and society and live in their own worlds of privatized sovereignty. These are men who dream of capitalism without democracy. Your books expose the long history of using special zones, be they Hong Kong or the Cayman Islands or Dubai, where the usual laws and rules don't apply. And we're seeing that strategy today metastasize into something far more ambitious and dangerous than it has been in certain past iterations. How did you get interested in the subject of zones and the ideology of a world that foresees capitalism without democracy?

Quinn Slobodian: Crack-Up Capitalism, for me, was very much understood as a sequel to a book I'd written just before that called Globalists. My basic feeling as an intellectual historian, a historian of global history, was that we often failed when we tried to understand the world in the terms that were provided to us, understanding the world as comprised of billiard ball nations, a world as a set of containers, and we are citizens of one nation and not of another. And if we think about something grander than that, we might think about the United Nations or other forms of international law or international organizations. And then beyond that, there was this abstract world that got referred to as globalization.

And Globalists, the book I wrote before, was a way of talking about globalization not as a liberation of markets since the end of the Cold War, where everything was set free, and money and goods and people were able to zap around the world like lasers. But in fact, the '90s and 2000s as a time of an increasing encasement of the world's markets through new agreements, new laws, new regulations, which made certain kinds of economic futures possible and made other ones not possible. And that often, in the process, meant people and nations ceding certain parts of their sovereignty upward to multilateral organizations or international agreements, made things like free trade, capital security often have more priority than the rights of people inside nations themselves.

So this is often referred to as neoliberal globalism, and what I did with that book is I said, "This thing has a long history." Goes back to the end of the empires, of the Habsburg Empires and the Ottoman Empires at the end of the First World War, and it's actually been an eighty-year project to try to figure out how to build up a legal and institutional architecture that can sit on top of nations and provide exit possibilities for capital, can provide security for investors, and provide certain kinds of mobility and not others.

Crack-Up Capitalism came as a sequel because my feeling was that we were not entirely clued into things happening above the nation, but we were also perhaps even more ignorant about things happening beneath the envelope of the nation in the space of what I talk about in the book as the special economic zones, where since the 1970s especially, nations have ring-fenced jurisdictions inside of their nations and given them a separate legal status, separate regulatory status, often lighter labor laws, often lighter environmental laws, and done so to make them into bespoke landing pads for transnational capital. Lift the regulations here to make it more likely that an investor comes and builds a factory here. You lift certain kinds of oversight there so that people will use that as a place to book profits offshore. And this has become the functional fragmentation by which globalization works, even as it becomes more integrated at a supranational level.

So my first goal was really just a descriptive one, as a historian, as someone who teaches history in the classroom, to figure out ways to introduce readers to sets of geographies they might not always be that familiar with, the kinds of places that Geneva and the WTO create, and then the kinds of places that Hong Kong and Dubai create, and even smaller than that, economic zones that might exist around your local port authority or even some place no bigger than a warehouse off the side of a highway, but nonetheless offer a machinery for the everyday workings of globalization. So it all began as a pedagogical project in a way, or a project of political education.

But as you say, there is a payoff that aims more in the direction of techno-libertarianism and some of the more drastic fantasies of the recent Silicon Valley, right? Because not everyone just saw this as a project of building infrastructure of global investment and capitalism. Some people, the very people that we both study, took that as a way of imagining a world where the zone could become not just part of a landscape of globalization, but a prototype for reorganizing global civil society as such.

Gil Duran: Capitalism always has to innovate and accelerate and find new profit centers, so I see this metastasization as an example of that. It is now about getting beyond even not just little zones. I worked for a governor, I worked for a few mayors. We use zones to incentivize bringing a biotech office here or there, but it doesn't mean you get to escape all laws, all regulations, and you're no longer part of our democracy. So what they're doing is saying, "Hey, this can be used as an escape hatch from the entire system."

And in a way, what they're doing is trying to monetize the idea of sovereignty. We will create this new zone, be it a warehouse on the side of a highway or a piece of land in Latin America, and you can pay us to become subscribers of that zone, and we will offer you freedom from democracy and belonging in this other form of a nation. So on one level, they're trying to remake government in their own image. It's interesting how this comes out of anti-government ideology, and we'll get to that in a minute, but the use of zones to create special governance dates back a pretty long time. It's not exactly new. You use Hong Kong as an example—

Quinn Slobodian: Yeah.

Gil Duran: The City of London, the financial zone, not the actual city itself, for those who don't know—

Quinn Slobodian: Mm-hmm.

Gil Duran: It's a bit of a confusing term 'cause people are like, "What do you mean London?" No, the City of London is a very different, the Wall Street area of London. That's a zone. You use these examples as core ideas, but you've also documented how the zones work in Honduras, Dubai, China. There's a wide range of zones and what they're used for, so give us a brief history of zones, and what distinguishes a zone from a simple privatization or special economic area? What makes a zone a zone, really?

Quinn Slobodian: Yeah. That longer history of what a zone is and the prehistory of the modern special economic zone is one of the things that I've found most interesting about the topic. Because we take for granted now that if you imagine a map of the world or the globe, it's divided up into two hundred-some-odd units that are nations, that are somehow internally consistent. You imagine them being a relatively smooth legal space internally, inhabited mostly by citizens of that nation, that may be recent immigrants, but also may be people with a longer history of settlement or residence in that patch of territory, but that there's a legibility to the world. You will look at the map and see the familiar logos and the outlines of the borders of nations from Iran to Nigeria to wherever.

But that is actually a very recent version of the world map, right? If you look at the world map from the nineteenth century, you'll see a world in which large parts of the map are painted the color of the mother empire, usually pink for the British Empire. Parts of the map are still painted the color for the Portuguese Empire, the French Empire, and so on. And these are often large, sprawling territorial holdings that were, in fact, very loosely administered in many cases, so there wasn't necessarily a lot of on-the-ground presence. Often, it was indirect. It was being done through local elites. It was being done through local, more hereditary forms of leadership.

If you looked even closer, what you would find is actually a great variation in the political and legal arrangements that characterize the world of empires. My book does indeed begin with Hong Kong for a reason, because when Hong Kong was granted under duress by China to the British, it was granted as a special kind of space—it was a Crown colony, but it was designed to act as a free port, so they could allow for trade from neighboring merchants, even from people from neighboring empires that could operate duty-free. Singapore was designed similarly in the nineteenth century, basically settled by an emissary of the British East India Company, turned into a self-managed space through arrangements with local elites, sometimes through military domination, and then opening its doors to local merchants, and thus winning a kind of momentum, and in a certain way, a kind of consent from a local commercial class who was able to take advantage of the access to global markets that they could use through this gateway to global consumers.

The world of empires was filled with these concessions, hinterlands, treaty ports, extraterritorial enclaves that were settled by different European powers. So there was a real patchwork mosaic of politics and of laws that characterized the world of the nineteenth century. If you look at the politics of reactionaries, whether they're capitalist reactionaries or more cultural reactionaries, often they're actually quite annoyed by the era of the modern nation-state. We think of the right as being nationalist, but in fact, nationalism was a mixed bag if you're a conservative or a reactionary, right? Nationalism, yes, it brought new regimes of exclusion and new forms of military expansion, but it also brought the possibility for redistribution, welfare, rights being shared across a national population. Ultimately, democracy comes out as a practice, as a conjoined twin in certain ways of the nation.

People on the right have often dreamed about somehow rolling back this process of the emergence of a pretty stable map of two hundred nations and trying to figure out how to perforate holes again in that map, and design spaces now that they could use for their own purposes, that would be designed according to their own desires, and that would, most importantly, get around that problem of popular sovereignty and the dreams that often accompanied the end of empire in the nineteen sixties and seventies, the high point of decolonization. The writings and work of people like Frantz Fanon and Kwame Nkrumah, Che Guevara, these people are all speaking at a time when the nation was actually something that was seen as the endpoint of a very vigorous liberation struggle.

It was precisely at that point, not coincidentally, that Milton Friedman and other free market radical intellectuals rediscovered a place like Hong Kong and fell in love with it, because it was a place that had been insulated against those demands of post-colonial sovereignty, had remained a colony. It had been insulated against the demands of democratic accountability. It was governed more or less like a corporation. The financial secretary was more important than the governor. Both were appointed directly from Westminster. It was a place that mostly saw the business of governance as about creating a stable and inviting investment climate for people who wanted to, by the nineteen sixties and seventies, do textile manufacturing, do plastic flower and souvenir manufacturing, and do the beginnings of financial services, especially as telecommunications made the possibility of a global workday for the financial world a reality.

The storyline of my book is the emergence of the post-colonial nation, and then the short-circuiting by way of something like Hong Kong back to an imperial age of the nineteenth century, and then the attempt to make now this very old-fashioned thing—what's more old-fashioned than a crown colony of Hong Kong?—how can you make that look futuristic? Make this relic appear like a template for late twentieth century and eventually twenty-first century capitalism.

And the zone that they then begin to design becomes distinctive in the sense that it is subnational, it is territorially defined, and it is characterized by a different set of laws and regulation than those that exist outside of it. Those regulations include a certain insulation from democratic accountability, right? So that's why it's different from, let's say, the famous example of a suburb of Atlanta seceding when richer parts of sprawling cities decide they don't want to pay taxes for the inner city, they'll secede. They haven't created a zone exactly, because they are still operating at some level with an idea of a democratically arranged political space. They've reengineered it in a way that is better for their own perpetuation of their own wealth. But a special economic zone becomes that by the fact that it suspends normal forms of democratic practice and governance.

So for those people who are hearing about this for the first time or have not thought about it for a while, it's important to know the basic narrative is that even if Milton Friedman and a couple of his neoliberal buddies saw and fell in love with the zone model in Hong Kong in the late 1970s, and indeed then brought it back to Thatcher's England, people might know Canary Wharf, the second financial center now alongside the old City of London, the Square Mile. That was a direct attempt to export a Hong Kong model by taking power out of the hands of a local left-wing labor council, giving it to business people, giving them a huge number of pieces of corporate welfare and transfer of public funds, allowing for a new space that is not responsive necessarily to the needs of the community, but is very responsive to the needs of the financial sector.

But where the thing really kicked off, besides these one-off examples, they tried to do it in New York, too, didn't get very far, but it really took off in mainland China. When Deng Xiaoping did his reform and opening-up period beginning in the late 1970s, the way that China opened up is through the zone model. So China did not open up all at once. It did not do a perestroika, it did not do a glasnost. It did zonification. So Shenzhen, right next to Hong Kong, was the first example, literally ring-fenced off. When you entered, laws changed. You lost access to the social welfare you would have had back home. You lost access to the lifetime employment contract you had back home. What you gained was entry into a place where there was now wage labor for foreigners to invest, the ability to own land, and for some people, the ability to get very, very rich.

This model was replicated up and down the coast of China and eventually in most parts of China. So most of the special economic zones that we have now in the world, of which there are over six thousand, most of them are in China. And that is indeed one of the reasons for focusing on them for me, too, because I feel like even now, when the power and might of Chinese political economy is so obvious, we still don't have very many good narratives for understanding how that happened. We don't actually have a smooth story that we tell, let's say, to high school or college students about how the Cold War period entered the globalization period, and then suddenly, here comes China as a peer of Americas.

I think the zone is a secret way into that story because you can show how through trial and error, gradualism, reformism that was more experimental than it was absolute, China was able to introduce commodification, privatization in these patches of land in such a way that they were able to work with their advantage in the global international division of labor and fine-tune it really in a way to fit demands of the world market.

Gil Duran: So they were able to do a reverse Hong Kong in terms of little patches of capitalism for laboratories of experimentation without the risk of interference or infection by American ideas and its government. And it seems to me that in a way, what some of these new network state types or zone promoters are after is sort of a reverse of that, which is how do you carve out zones from democracy where we can experiment with corporate capitalist authoritarianism?

In a way, what I see a lot of is these guys basically saying, people like Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan, who's the main force behind the network state movement, saying essentially, China got it right. It's about authoritarian capitalism is the twenty-first century, not this thing where we let people vote and have opinions. And so in a way, it's important for people to understand that history in China because it shows you the power of what a zone can do. In this case, it's interesting that a communist country is at the heart of global capitalism today, right? Everybody needs China for manufacturing, for technology, for all of these things. And so they've been able to create this hybrid system that gives them capitalism without democracy, which seems to be the exact same thing that our Silicon Valley would-be overlords are after.

Quinn Slobodian: I think that's a really good way of putting it. And one can see this very clearly in the things that they say and as I reproduce in the book. I mean, the book is a work of history. It's mostly driven by archival sources, so it's not so much me just saying, "Here's my idea of what's happening." It's me recounting articles people published, conversations they had over the last fifty years to show the development of a counterintuitive line of thinking, which nevertheless is exactly what you're saying, which is: how can it be that self-described libertarians, self-described believers in freedom, could become so fixated on something that is quite clearly an effort to realize authoritarian capitalism, a capitalism without democracy?

Time and again, they make that so clear in the work they were doing, for example, in the creation of what I describe in the first chapter of my book, an index of economic freedom, which is specifically designed against indexes of freedom like that of Freedom House, which is very well known, which is focused on things like multi-party elections, the freedom of the press, the freedom to congregate, the freedom to protest. The people I describe in the book quite literally saw that and said, "That's not freedom. That isn't freedom. Being able to vote isn't freedom." Why? Because democracies lead to people demanding more and more from the government. It leads to higher taxes, and taxes are nothing more, as they said, while they're designing this index of economic freedom, than forced labor requirements.

For me, as a historian, my way of going about it is give people the rope to hang themselves with, right? I don't actually need to go out and condemn them because of my own moral outrage. I think we can actually just draw their arguments as they exist. And what you see then is a kind of openness to global events in a way. That's one of the things that I think what you're describing is helpful because they were more sensitized to what was happening in China than many other people were. So the mainline political liberals weren't that interested because they just saw lack of democracy, they saw oppression, the use of cheap wage labor, and people coming in from the countryside, not being given social rights, just being thrown into the grinder of sweatshops.

But the libertarian and neoliberals in the US and the UK saw these zones, and they called them, in this extraordinary example that I have from the early 2000s, "the Hayekian islands of experimentation." To them, China was the one that was pushing Hayek's idea of evolutionary discovery of new forms of institutions that were better adapted to market competition because they were freed from the veto points of democracy, right? So that very person compared China unfavorably to the European Union. So this person was a conservative in the UK who wanted to leave the European Union. He said, "What do we have in Europe? We have this sclerotic mass of regulations that we got to by an overdose and aggregation over time of too much democracy."

Whereas what do they have in China? They're wise enough to sweep away the democratic veto point and let entrepreneurs make their own choices inside of these zones. And when they go too far, when they get too big for their britches, when they start challenging central power, you cut the cord. You close down the zone that they're working on. You do what they did with Jack Ma, right? You compel them to sell off parts of their portfolio, send the signal down the party chain that they are no longer to be given favorable treatment. Indeed, a masterful oscillation between central power and decentralized power, where you let things happen at the periphery, guide them from afar, soft credit, whatever, special treatment, but then if the problems happen, you seize them and choke it out, the same way you would with any franchisee or whatever.

Patri Friedman, who you talk about, were watching this stuff. They were watching the example of Hong Kong and the example of the Chinese special economic zone and were filled with admiration. So it's a hundred percent certain that the things we think of now as exit models of right-wing libertarianism are based explicitly on East Asian models. So it's not for nothing that Srinivasan is, at least for a while, was based in Singapore and has set up his network school in Malaysia. The kind of stuff that, for example, the Berkeley anthropologist, Aihwa Ong, has described as the graduated sovereignty that exists by virtue of this zonification is a laboratory for the alternative forms of governance that someone like Friedman is interested in, right? The supposed Cambrian explosion of government forms is something that East Asia actually has been doing for the last fifty years, right?

Gil Duran: We often hear, in California, people criticizing the state, for instance, the slow progress of high-speed rail, saying China would have this done in two years. But it's a lot easier when you can just bulldoze the people off the land, and no one has any rights to stop you. You know, it's much harder in a state where there's laws, there's rules, there's property ownership. They often leave out the important parts of what makes China's rapid movement on certain kinds of things possible.

But now, our plugs.

[MID-ROLL AD BREAK]

Riley Robbins: And that's halftime for the pod, which means it's time for the plugs. Quinn Slobodian, the most name-checked expert on the Nerd Reich pod across all of our guests. He has a number of great books you should check out today, and some of which we've talked about already. Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy, and Hayek's Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right. His new book is with Ben Tarnoff. It's called Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, releasing April twenty-first, so pre-order it today. And speaking of pre-orders, also pre-order Gil's book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy from Gil Duran. Releases this August, but it makes a great Christmas gift. Never too early. Now, back to the pod with Quinn and Gil.

[END AD BREAK]

Gil Duran: And we're back. You mentioned Hayek, and you wrote a book, Hayek's Bastards, which really looks into the history of the ideology that has led to some of these ideas, zones or libertarianism, which has now morphed into something else, especially in the era of Donald Trump. And Hayek genuinely feared that government, big government, would become totalitarian at some point. And for a long time, I feel like there was this idea that there was something called libertarianism, and that it was somehow about protecting individual liberty and blocking government authoritarianism.

And a lot of people in Silicon Valley adopted the libertarian moniker, people like Peter Thiel, for instance, that that was their politics, not right or left, but libertarian, although one might argue that libertarianism is inherently right-wing in certain very important respects. But along the way, it seems like this idea has curdled into something else, and that the fear of totalitarianism or serfdom has become active hostility toward democracy and a road, a literal road to serfdom, at least for the majority of people in the world who are not wealthy enough to have ownership in some kind of zone that is free of democracy. Give us a little bit about who Hayek was, what his main ideas were, and how they have been used more recently to promote a very right-wing ideology of exit.

Quinn Slobodian: Friedrich Hayek was born at the turn of the century in Austro-Hungarian Empire, was raised and socialized as a member of the Habsburg Empire, and would have rightly assumed that he would've taken a role at some point as a civil servant, as an overseer of the Austrian Empire, operating from Vienna, as most people of liberal education would have ended up. The war intervened, and the Habsburg Empire collapsed, and Austria was shrunk to this little miniature version of itself. Due to his brilliance, he was plucked out of this relative obscurity and brought to the very heart of academic prestige at that time in the 1930s, which was London School of Economics, where he ended up crossing swords with John Maynard Keynes. He was brought to LSE by Lionel Robbins, and he became someone who represented the more skeptical wing of the liberal economic establishment in the sense that he feared the openness of the Labour Party and the openness of British trade unions to more collectivist forms of politics that were being, at that time, still spoken of quite highly in the Soviet Union.

So the 1930s, it's important to remember, was a time when many people were in awe of the Soviet industrial expansion and growth, and it was not quite yet taboo, actually, for people even in the center left to speak highly of the Soviet Union. And Hayek was very concerned about that from the beginning, set himself up as the, in some ways, loyal opposition, though not always that loyal, to what became known as Keynesianism. So as the welfare state came into existence in the course of the Second World War, he became the skeptical voice on that.

And I'm not phrasing this in as dark a way as it's sometimes phrased, because if you read his most famous book, The Road to Serfdom, from 1944, you might be surprised, as sometimes my students are, to find that there's quite a bit of what we would call the welfare state is in that book. And he actually does believe there needs to be some kind of floor set for the very poor. He does believe that there can be some kind of taxation if it's being used for socially positive purposes. So it's not a radically libertarian text in the way that we now think of radical libertarianism.

And that becomes important because as he becomes more famous in the 1950s and '60s, and especially draws disciples in the United States, you get a fight over the meaning of Hayek. So he himself lives until his 80s, so he doesn't die until the early 1990s, and on the one hand, he becomes a mascot for people like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in their campaigns for austerity and welfare reform. But then he also becomes a fought-over figure within the intellectual worlds of the neoliberal and libertarian community, some of who are interested in his ideas of social evolution, as I alluded to earlier, this idea that we should think about the world as filled with peoples and communities that are constantly in a process of Lamarckian evolution, and when some communities figure out habits that make them plug better into the world free market, then those habits proliferate and reproduce and become more dominant.

Habits and mentalities he did see as connected to racial groups and national groups, but it wasn't a hard line. He thought there could be emulation, populations could learn over time, and he didn't have extremely reactionary views, in fact, on things like race science. Some of his people in his extended circle, however, did. What I describe as Hayek's bastards in that book are the people who are in the larger orbit of Hayek, who, in the 1980s and '90s, and into the 2000s, took his ideas of communities that were evolutionarily competing and really bolted it on to very old-fashioned ideas of hyper-exclusionary race science.

So someone who is probably the most famous figure there is Charles Murray. In his 1994 book, The Bell Curve, he brought out of the cupboard all of these dusty old ideas of IQ and intelligence measurement and tried to put together an idea of libertarianism in terms of economic capacity with an idea of race science and used that as a new way to justify things like immigration restriction, pronatalism for high IQ—the right racial groups—and opposition to what he calls the dysgenic tendencies being produced by the welfare state.

So what people would know now as the alt-right or the more recent far right is a sometimes uncomfortable, but by now certainly consistent, melding of ideas of economic freedom with ideas of racial essentialism and national essentialism. Where I think we're at now, and this is what I think is actually quite interesting, is a rupture within the libertarian and broadly speaking, Hayekian community. 2020, I think it was, Tyler Cowen, who is an important neoliberal thinker, made a passing remark in his blog, Marginal Revolution, which I think is actually quite important, where he says, "The libertarian movement has split."

What was the split? He said, on the one side, there were people, and he was claiming it was people like him, who were interested in what you call state capacity libertarianism. So how can you get a productive relationship between governments and private enterprise, that government acts in a way that is not wasteful or driven only by the demands of marginalized groups, but is operating in a way to keep the flywheel of economic growth spinning and even innovation spinning and when necessary, going over the heads of the democratic populace. So your point just now about high-speed rail in California is exactly to this point, right?

The two biggest books in the ideas policy space from last year were Dan Wang's book, Breakneck, and Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's book, Abundance. And both of those make the very point you're making, which is that China was able to do what it has done because it did not get bound up in laws and regulations, and it organized the state the way engineers organize states. It sees a big problem, solves it without being too concerned with consulting every single person along the way.

According to the Tyler Cowen model, that is still in the tradition of Hayek, and I don't think that's totally wrong. It's not for nothing that someone like Matt Yglesias and Conor Friedersdorf, who are in the Abundance orbit, were just this last week speaking about The Constitution of Liberty by Hayek as this extraordinary book.

But there's another side of the Hayekian lineage that Cowen also referred to, within that George Mason University world, often referred to as the fever swamp libertarians. And it's associated with one particular place, which is the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, which was set up in 1982 by someone named Lew Rockwell, and from the beginning, was designed to be the culturally conservative, more right-wing version of Hayekian or libertarian thinking. So to them, the Cato Institute, The Heritage Foundation, had gotten too close to Washington, DC and had just become a policy shop and had given up on their libertarian bona fides.

So you needed to get back to the root of hardwired culture, hardwired belief in religious values as well, and a kind of open willingness to pay fealty to things like racial difference, national patriotism, in a strong opposition to neoconservative foreign policy abroad. So the other reason they'd be against The Heritage Foundation is they think they've tied themselves up too much with the military industrial complex and the willingness to send American troops overseas to do things like promote democracy.

You have the DC Beltway libertarians who are trying to make peace with the state insofar as it can realize their interests, and then you have this much more volatile wing of right wing with a lot of crossover with the very online alt-right world that we now talk of as gropers. So the Libertarian Party itself, for example, has now been taken over by the Mises Caucus, which is awash in memes, very interested in a kind of violent nativism, gleefully embracing misogyny and white supremacy.

I think that the way that libertarianism and Hayekianism circulates on the right now and in the present MAGA moment is an interesting mixture of these two sides. I think there are still people who believe in a kind of praiseworthy industrial policy of some kind, a more business-friendly, as you well know, Silicon Valley-friendly understanding of what the state can do to pave the way for the frontier investments in AI in particular that need to be done. And they think they can do that while still holding on to their libertarianism. It's a Chinese model of authoritarian capitalism that somehow, not giving in to the real problems of the modern pathologies of the state, which is democracy. And then it's no secret that there's also the darker groper wing of the libertarian community now, which is primarily interested, it seems, in cultural issues, if not outright demographic issues.

Gil Duran: Which seems to be largely winning in many ways because they can be so much louder than the people trying to find some kind of nuance in those ideas. You know, you mentioned Charles Murray, and I wanted to bring this up, although we could do a whole episode on this particular topic. The Sovereign Individual is a book that really wrapped up some of these ideas into a more modern package back in 1997, and that book by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg predicted a future in which technology would collapse existing nation states and lead to chaos and crime because automation was gonna fundamentally change everything, but that cognitive elites could escape into more protected private zones of sovereignty and be the builders and the masters of the future in this way.

And the first time I read that book, I didn't fully understand the degree to which "cognitive elites" comes straight out of Charles Murray and The Bell Curve, the idea that some people are better and smarter than other people, and therefore should rule, which is a very old idea we can trace all the way back to the Greeks. But in a way, it's inescapable that an ideology that is founded in this idea of certain elites deserving a higher place in a hierarchy over others would eventually become infected by all of the other supremacies and hierarchies that exist in the political world.

So we're seeing that, I think, in real time happening, and so much of what the zone idea is becoming is a form of new colonialism, colonialism with a tech twist. When we look at building a city in Honduras, Prospera, or taking over Greenland, which is mostly an indigenous population, and maybe building a freedom city there. Within a week of Maduro being kidnapped by US forces, the head of the Charter Cities Institute was pitching a freedom city in Venezuela. So in a way, it seems inescapable that these things would slide toward hierarchy and supremacy.

Curtis Yarvin gave an interview to the Anglo-Futurist podcast, where he said that what the UK needs to do is re-embrace its eighteenth and nineteenth century colonialism, and it needs to recolonize Africa, and envisioned a year 2100 Africa, where every person is under surveillance like cattle in Wyoming. He literally made that comparison. And we know where all of them are, and we give them kind of a subsistence living, but we don't allow them to breed too much. So when you have people out there who have been funded by billionaire capitalists pushing the hardest line possible, it's hard for the more mumbly version of that to compete.

Quinn Slobodian: I definitely hear what you're saying. I think that it's not for nothing, and this is the example I bring up in my book, The Sovereign Individual is, in a way, speculative science fiction, right? I mean, it is both a description of the way that globalization was going by the late 1990s as they saw it. You had increasing internet connections, the possibility of e-money or digital cash, allegedly part of the inspiration for Thiel to found PayPal. And they then project that forward and say, "Okay, what does that mean?"

Well, they say that means that existing nation-states are not long for this world, the labor of the masses is automated away, and welfare states collapse under their own indebtedness. A generalized system of civil war will set in, and we, the sovereign individuals, will exit and escape everyday territorial arrangements to live hopping from node to node, insulated from the dangers of a falling world. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is telling almost the exact same story at almost the exact same time, right, a couple of years earlier.

Fredric Jameson said that science fiction is always diagnostic, and so they're certainly diagnostic, right? They tell us something about the world in which they were written. The question, though, for me, is always: what political prescriptions might emerge from such diagnoses? I agree with you that these are, at least morally objectionable defenses of certain kinds of hardwired hierarchies, right? If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't have spent so much time writing that book.

Unfortunately, it's actually quite possible to live out all of the consequences of that kind of a belief system and be validated in them in our own current existing national arrangement. Right? So you don't actually need to create a new polity to have your own sense of entitlement and privilege reinforced in every imaginable way, and to have your own economic comfort facilitated by the institutional arrangements of the state in almost every way. With some creative accounting and some use of offshore havens and trusts and so on, you can really game the whole thing very well already, right?

So that leaves me with the question of: why would one go that extra level of effort to create a, let's say, a freedom city in Greenland or to recolonize Africa? Curtis Yarvin is a Swiftian satirist, basically, that has been taken seriously by gullible politicians, I would say. I don't know what's in his heart. I suspect I wouldn't want to know, but I think one can also see when he says things like that as being not the utterances of an evil man, although they might be that too, but also as diagnostic in the same way that Snow Crash and The Sovereign Individual were, right?

So when he was talking about turning Dubai into a corporation in 2009, that was the same time that Paul Romer, later Nobel Prize-winning economist, was saying similar things, right? Saying that Guantanamo Bay should be turned into a Canadian overseas protectorate and be turned into a new Hong Kong-style corporate entity. What he's saying now about Africa sounds a lot like Worldcoin, right? I mean, that's basically what Altman was trying to roll out by going out and doing iris scans of large swaths of any global south population he could get his hands on. That would be implicitly, right, a form of surveillance and biometric data mining.

So my question with all of these things is not has someone thought them or has someone said them, because the answer is, for almost everything, yes, someone has. Why would they be profitable or likely, given current situation? So Mark Lutter, Charter Cities Institute, product of George Mason University, has been on this beat for, as you know, decades, right? A very long time, and hasn't gotten very far. I mean, in some ways, I find what's interesting about the startup city movement is not that it exists or that it wants to do things, but that it's been able to do so little. Right? I mean, it's actually extraordinary that they have to make such a big deal out of Prospera, which is not that successful.

Gil Duran: It's like a hotel and a golf course and a few dead-looking offices.

Quinn Slobodian: Right. That's what I'm saying. That's what I say. People are not rushing there. If you sign up for their mailing list, which I do, just for research purposes, they're constantly just begging people to come and hang out because nobody wants to.

Gil Duran: Shittiest luxury resort in the world. That's what I heard.

Quinn Slobodian: Right, exactly. So that's the way it looks from all impressions. So I think there's two ways of interpreting that. One is our existing model of statecraft and the nation state as template is surprisingly resilient and resistant, actually, to venture innovative transformation, and that could be both good and bad, depending on how you feel about the nation. Or the other way of looking at it is they are harbingers of a larger shift, which we are only at the beginning of, right? And that they may look like failures now, but so did the beginnings of plantation agriculture in Ireland before it found the right conditions in the Caribbean or whatever. That these are actually the first shoots of something that may become a more dominant political model.

That's really the only reason to be interested in it, actually, is if you think it's the latter. What I find interesting about the present moment, and this is the arc of since we've been talking the last year and a half or so, is the breakthrough of this as a harbinger. The idea of it as a harbinger is now becoming something that media outlets seem to be interested in and clued into. So Spiegel, Newsweek, you're getting mainstream coverage of this idea of the freedom city and the network state. Yeah, I mean, in ways that wouldn't have existed before.

Now, I'm interested in the meta question, why are they interested now? And I actually have a theory about that, which is in the first Trump administration, the main narrative we had was globalization is over, nationalism is back. Nations competing with one another. There was the Russiagate idea, so this real concern about Russian interference in American democracy. But there was, in general, the political horizon was basically not more complex than thinking about nations or globalization.

In the intervening years, in the last five years, six years now, we have, I feel like, become more dipped in the acid bath of really online politics so that nothing really feels as naturalized anymore. The experience of the pandemic, the emergence of deeper and deeper silos that people live inside of online, I think makes the nation even seem tenuous now. And so the idea of the dissolution of that gap between the online experience of having your digital community and then an externalized real-life version of it, in the way that Srinivasan has been talking about for years and years, seemed pretty far out, I think, when he was publishing that some five, six years ago for the first time, but now I think it just feels intuitively more plausible for people. And so they're able to be like: "Oh, wait, is that one outcome of the present moment?" So it becomes more concerning.

Gil Duran: Until you go to one of their parties and realize there's no women there and everybody sucks. And then it's like: "Wait, I just wanna go to a bar in Oakland where there's real people and the possibility of a spontaneous interaction with somebody who doesn't work at the same company that I do." There's a lot of stuff, as you said, that they haven't thought through, and there's a lot of failure. For instance, Praxis, funded by Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Marc Andreessen, to create a new tech utopia city, first somewhere in the Mediterranean, then in Greenland, then in the Dominican Republic. I don't know. They keep changing the location. Last I heard, they were talking about building it in outer space.

Quinn Slobodian: Yeah.

Gil Duran: But it seems to have pretty much flamed out, and I think it flamed out because they gave a twenty-eight-year-old college dropout millions of dollars to go find a place to build a city, and I think he didn't do any of that, and he has now lost his funders, as far as I can tell. The media is now becoming aware of this Praxis idea at a moment when Praxis is kind of a zombie that no longer really exists. So everywhere you look, there's failure.

At the same time, this is their big chance. They'll never have a better chance than right now to get some of these zones carved out than under Trump, who has adopted a multipolarity strategy, trying to make the United States a colonial force, threatening Denmark to take Greenland, a NATO ally, which is insane and absurd. And he's also promised to build ten new freedom cities on federal land in the United States. And his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is pushing the creation of a freedom city, a pretty serious proposal in the ruins of Gaza.

As I mentioned earlier, less than a week after the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, you have Mark Lutter of the Charter Cities Institute proposing a city there, which was really just kind of a pitch, right? But they sense that there's a possibility that Trump, a real estate goon, will understand the value of selling off some territory and creating these new zones. I'm not sure whether he'll really do it. Part of the saving grace of Trump is that he burns and rips off almost everybody he comes across at some point. And it seems like there hasn't been enough progress made so far to actually start getting these cities built, because an executive order would be the cleanest way to do it, so why hasn't he done it yet?

At the same time, you've seen people like Brian Armstrong of Coinbase and Palmer Luckey of Anduril a few months ago, were pitching online for Trump to build a freedom city in Guantanamo. So you've got billionaires pushing this idea, and you've got lobbyists right now working Capitol Hill to try to build support for the freedom cities on federal land. So in a way, it's Trump plus the Silicon Valley network state types who have been able to at least give this its day in court. And I think we're gonna find out in the next year or two whether the freedom cities thing is something Trump plans to pursue, or whether it was just something he stuck in his platform to shut up the billionaires and get their campaign checks. But I think this is really the make or break moment for them, at least for now. They'll come back again in the future when things are worse. But isn't it the freedom cities thing? They've kind of hyperstitioned this into the discourse.

Quinn Slobodian: Praxis has been good at posting, right? They're good at making memes, and that has gotten them a certain distance, but it probably won't breach the kind of materialist obstacles which I think still exist to something like this actually taking place. Because I think it's a question of cities for what? I mean, David Harvey has an idea of the spatial fix. The spatial fix is a solution to a particular kind of a problem, and it's not clear to me that the California Forever model, for example, is able to overcome the existing series of trenches of already existing municipal control that will make something like that possible.

And even then, what would it be a fix to, the problem of having a gated community or a suburb? I mean, that's not a problem. They actually already exist. You can make one, probably very easy. Someone would be happy to help you design one. Prospera is another example. Well, it's a spatial fix in search of a problem. It doesn't actually know what it's there for, because most of the things that they're trying to emulate are already in existence. If you're trying to emulate a way to have offshore registration of e-commerce, it's all over the place. There's lots of it. If you want a place to register a business in ways that will free you from accountability or to register a ship in ways that will lift a lot of the regulations, dude, that's how the world already works.

The reason why no one is flocking to Prospera is because we already have a globe filled of Prosperas, right? We already have thousands and thousands of examples of capitalism without democracy an actual existing business person could choose from. They've got a whole menu. I would say we actually do have the things that we're asking about. They're called Manhattan-sized data centers. They are the transformation of the American landscape, the annexing of LNG-burning power plants that's happened in the last two years, something much more significant than anything Prospera or California Forever was ever gonna be, that is happening right now. That's happening in Arizona, it's happening in New Mexico, it's happening in Tennessee.

So they are not inhabited by very many people, because they don't require a lot of people to operate. But I think something that is perhaps anachronistic about the freedom city is it's an understanding of an economic model of accumulation that perhaps no longer applies, right? I think that the frontier way of making money under digital capitalism doesn't require a city full of people. It actually requires a couple of engineers to run a mostly automated, enormous data center and in the future, dark factories that are being imagined by people like Bezos and Musk.

If anything, I think that the part that's not futuristic enough, in a way, about our expectations for the next wave of exitarianism or cyber libertarianism is us still having the naive belief that these things will actually be designed for humans. Most likely they won't be, and that's actually the scariest part about them, because once you've eliminated humans, then you've really eliminated the problem of democracy altogether. At the moment, that seems to be where it's at now, and the fact that Musk is in the process of, it looks like, merging SpaceX with xAI on the promise of data centers in space, these are the spatial fixes I think that we need to be worried about.

In the sovereign individual model, we are the hinterland, right? I mean, we are the ones left behind. The thing that I end the Crack-Up Capitalism book with is from a book that I'm sure that you love as well, Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. She has this great moment where her family is trying to figure out if they want to try to gain entry into this small settlement that's on the coast of California, that's a desalination plant that's run by a Japanese, German, Swiss, Canadian conglomerate or something. So it's this extraterritorial enclave. If you go in, you have to work like a dog in their desalination plant, but they give you housing and they give you security.

And her family is like: "Well, we live out here in the wastelands. We have precarious existence. There's marauding criminals everywhere, but we have a bit of our own autonomy. Do we wanna give it up to go into this thing?" The line that I think is so perfect from the protagonist is: "Yeah, I've read a lot of these sci-fi novels. They're always about these people trying to escape the company state or the company city, but real life is not like that. In real life, we're trying to get in. We wanna get into the company city. We wanna get into the company town, 'cause that's where there's a modicum of security and the survival infrastructure that you actually need."

I feel like that's still the turn that sometimes I'm worried our debates and discussions about the exitarians hasn't made, that actually we need to be bearing in mind that Octavia Butler's future is probably the right one, that most people are gonna be giving up as many of their freedoms as they need to, to get into these cities, rather than those things just vanishing into another planet or into an O'Neill cylinder, like in Elysium or whatever.

Gil Duran: Well, on that happy note, Quinn Slobodian, thanks for joining us on the Nerd Reich Podcast.

Quinn Slobodian: It was a pleasure.

At 12 p.m. PST on Friday, February 13, I’ll host a live Zoom meeting with Jacob Silverman, author of Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. If you bought the book and have questions for Jacob—or have general questions about tech radicalism under the Trump regime—please join us for a conversation with Q&A. Click here to let me know if you plan to attend. More details to come.

“It’s like watching a a high-suspense caper movie where a team of corrupt billionaires—united by their friendship with a dead pedophile—must destroy a country in order to escape...”

That’s from my recent conversation with Wajahat Ali about the tech oligarchs in the Epstein Files. As it turns out, Epstein had significant relationships with Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Kimbal Musk, and others.

In fact, the New York Times reported that an investment firm co-founded by Thiel accepted $40 million from Epstein and the two men corresponded for at least five years.

“Visit me Caribbean,” Epstein urged Thiel in 2018.

Watch the full conversation here:

Donald Trump’s obsession with Greenland has escalated into a full-blown international crisis. He is threatening military action against NATO ally Denmark and imposing tariffs on European countries that don’t support his quixotic quest to own the icy island.

Meanwhile, Greenlanders have taken to the streets in protest to make it clear they are not for sale. Polls show a majority of Americans oppose stealing Greenland through military force—with even 68% of Republicans opposing military action, according to Quinnipiac.

But there is one constituency that shares Trump’s Arctic fever: tech billionaires. Writing for the New Republic, Casey Michel exposes how a handful of tech oligarchs have a deep interest in Greenland’s natural resources.

From “The Oligarchs Pushing for Conquest in Greenland”:

But there’s another element to this Greenland obsession that hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention—and it is just as important to Trump’s designs on plundering Greenland and claiming the island as America’s: money. Specifically, the money set to be gained by the kinds of oligarchic interests that have long backed Trump, and that now stand to benefit from American suzerainty over Greenland. To update another phrase, which we’ve seen recently race to the fore in Venezuela: It’s about looting the resources, stupid.

As Michel documents, this isn’t speculation. The Guardian reported last April that “some of Donald Trump's biggest campaign donors and investors are positioned to potentially profit from any American takeover of Greenland.” Tech moguls and fossil fuel executives have invested in extraction companies across the island—all waiting to pluck it clean if they can just eliminate those pesky Danish and Greenlandic regulatory authorities.

A “closed loop” of investors, billionaires, and Trump has emerged, circling Greenland like a committee of vultures. And a tech billionaire-funded group has raised the prospect of building a Network State city there.

I encourage you to read his full piece for details and names. Michel’s piece also makes a nice mention of my work on this subject.

The Oligarchs Pushing for Conquest in Greenland

Trump’s fixation on filching the island territory from Denmark may seem like the demented ravings of a mad king. But to a cohort of plutocrat weirdos, it makes perfect sense.

The New RepublicCasey Michel

Last April, The Nerd Reich newsletter created a four-minute explainer video focused on this bizarre Greenland obsession. You can watch by clicking below—and please send it to everyone you know.

Less than one week after American military forces conducted an illegal raid to kidnap the authoritarian president of Venezuela, some want to build a Network State there.

Mark Lutter, executive director of the Charter Cities Institute, has issued a public call for Trump to put a “freedom city” in Venezuela:

Venezuela doesn’t need to become another Iraq.
It needs a Freedom City.

The mission is not endless war. It is to end a criminal regime without another trillion-dollar disaster.

Reality: the old system is still there—corrupt courts, cartels, broken institutions. Fixing everything at once won’t work.

So don’t fix everything. Start with one city that actually works.

A Freedom City = new land, new rules, real property rights, real rule of law—jointly built with the U.S.

Freedom city is Trump’s word for a network state—a new sovereign territory ruled by corporations. The concept keeps popping up these days. From Gaza to Greenland, from Honduras to Ukraine, all of Trump’s aggressive foreign policy moves seem to come with a side of Network State ideology. Suddenly, the United States has been seized by a spirit of colonial conquest, seeking to plant flags and build strange new cities everywhere.

(For a basic backgrounder, read this short piece I wrote for Tech Policy Press: Trump’s Gaza Fantasy and the Network State: The Tech-Fueled Future of Privatized Sovereignty.)

My forthcoming book (pre-order here!) will detail the Silicon Valley plan to cover the globe in a network of these tech dystopian cities. If you wish to learn more right now, researcher and writer Jenny Cohn has been posting very informative threads and links over on BlueSky.

Yesterday, I joined writers Wajahat Ali and Jacob Silverman to discuss Silicon Valley’s role in Trump’s plot to seize Venezuela and Greenland. Watch it below: Transcript available on YouTube.

“The rational fear of those who dislike economic inequality is that the rich will convert their economic power into political power: that they’ll tilt elections, or pay bribes for pardons, or buy up the news media to promote their views. I used to be able to claim that tech billionaires didn’t actually do this—that they just wanted to refine their gadgets. But unfortunately in the current administration we’ve seen all three.”

Paul Graham, a famed tech investor who co-founded the Y Combinator startup accelerator, posted these words today on X. It’s a stunning admission. But not even Silicon Valley can ignore the political corruption and radicalization rising in its midst.

In today’s episode of the Nerd Reich podcast, Dr. Olivier Jutel and I discuss this very subject: how the cult of Silicon venture capital has become an existential threat to both democracy and humanity.

We explore how VCs became the “de facto state planners” of American capitalism, why they’re now desperately betting on government bailouts to save their failed investments, and how their Network State ideology aims to extract maximum value from our country before exiting to their own private sovereignties.

Spoiler: they don’t plan for the rest of us to come along for the ride.

• Listen on Apple podcasts
• Listen on Spotify

Available wherever you get your podcasts. Full transcript below.

This podcast—which regularly takes on dangerous billionaires—is brought to you by our paid subscribers. Their contributions fund 100% of our work. Please help keep The Nerd Reich paywall-free in 2026. If you can, join hundreds of readers in becoming a paid subscriber today. Click here to join.
Happy New Year!

The Nerd Reich Podcast: Inside The Tech Cult: How Venture Capitalists Plan to Exit Democracy

Transcripts are auto-generated and may contain errors.

GIL DURAN: Donald Trump is assaulting American democracy, but venture capital is bankrolling and supporting it. And they're not just writing checks. They have a plan—a plan to exit democracy entirely, to create their own governance systems and to remake the world according to their vision of network states, charter cities, and crypto-enabled sovereign zones. Venture capital has a new pitch: absolute political radicalism. These aren't just investors. They're ideologues with billions of dollars and increasingly desperate schemes. They want to cash out their failing bets by destroying the systems that made their wealth possible in the first place.

My guest today is Olivier Jutel of the University of Otago in New Zealand. He studies venture capital with a critical eye. His recent lecture, "A Critical Theory of Venture Capital," explains how this small group of men became the de facto state planners of American capitalism. In this episode, we discuss our current crisis, one that is driving them toward increasingly extreme, even apocalyptic, political visions. From Peter Thiel to Marc Andreessen to the entire network funding Donald Trump and JD Vance, we trace how the cult of venture capital went from funding apps to funding fascism. Here we go.

Olivier, welcome to the Nerd Reich Podcast.

OLIVIER JUTEL: Thanks so much, Gil. It's great to be on with you.

GIL: Let's talk today about venture capital. You did a recent lecture called "A Critical Theory of Venture Capital," where you looked at what's happening in the world today and how venture capital plays a big role in it. But even people who may have heard of venture capital may not understand why it's important or the role it plays in our society in general. Venture capital actually makes up a small percentage of our total economy, but it has a massive influence over our lives and increasingly today over our politics. And you've described venture capitalists in some pretty stark terms. You've said they are the de facto state planners of American capitalism. What do you mean by that? And why does this small group of men have such outsized power today?

OLIVIER: I traced some of this history going back to the first Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Draper, Gaither and Anderson. These were sort of military-financial grandees of the establishment, looking at California as this place where you could pluck young scientists from Stanford or wherever else and really sort of align all of these capabilities and capacities into imagining, quote, "the future." That's the real sort of power that venture capital has as its hegemonic rollover. The rest of this sort of enterprise is: yes, we think in 10-year terms and we think about the future in this grandiose way.

GIL: You say in your lecture that venture capital has become a synonym for innovation. And that seems to be a key to understanding this. So they're not investing in pork belly futures or other things that might yield returns over the course of time in the continuation of the American economy. They're betting on important disruptive technologies in sectors that are going to radically transform the economy—at least theoretically. In some cases, they're making big bets in disruptive technologies and that's sort of what gives them their power. And as you were saying, there's this history with them being enmeshed in the past with the military industrial complex. You know, when Joe Biden left office, his last speech, he said there was now a tech industrial complex that was rising up and posing a threat to democracy. Very nice of him to say that at the last minute as he was exiting the White House.

So they invest in these disruptive technologies. And another interesting part of venture capital is how they make their money. And we talked about this in a recent episode with Catherine Bracy, who wrote a book on venture capital called World Eaters. You point out that the way they make their money is not the way people generally think they are—with making these amazing investments constantly—but rather through a more pedestrian fee structure. So explain to us how they make their money, how this shapes their incentives. And are they really taking risks or are they just extracting fees regardless of outcomes?

OLIVIER: Yeah, so there you go. There's been this trajectory, this historical trajectory that VC has been on. And one of these is the sort of hyper-financialization of our economy, which has made it easier for pools of private equity to come together to reap sort of windfall capital gains. And I mentioned Draper, Gaither, Anderson. And what they did was essentially—it's in the name. It's the general partners. It's the named partners. They literally said, "We met forming NATO"—the first American ambassador to NATO, two-star Air Force general, the head of the RAND Corporation. So you're trading in this grand status and you're bringing in other limited partners. So the general partners, they're on the name. Limited partners are giving up their capital for the GPs, the general partners, to manage.

And essentially what happens is: a big pool of capital, something like Andreessen Horowitz—I think it's at 48 billion or whatever it's at right now—that pool of capital is managed by those partners who get 20% of the overall profits once various products and startups and assets are either acquired or come to market, and the rest of the general partners get 80%. But there's also this fee structure, right? Somewhere between 2 to 3% overall per year for managing this fund.

There are eras in VC investment that are sort of like high water marks. I mean, like the dot-com era was this sort of "deregulating telecommunications"—as they put it, there is blue ocean territory here to seize. There's sort of trading in that Halcyon days, because the returns since dot-com have not been great. So they talk about themselves as like navigating the "trough of despair." And there's some quote from a guy from Craft Ventures who talks about how "a startup is just chewing glass and looking at the abyss of death, harnessing the lightning of technology." You know, they talk about risk, but we are at this sort of parasitic phase where the hundreds of billions of dollars injected into the economy is not really birthing the kind of great innovations.

And as Peter Thiel said, "We were supposed to have flying cars" or whatever it was. And we're not really getting that. We're getting sort of like software-as-a-service or other sort of like monopolistic forms of tech. You mentioned the "World Eaters" moniker, which comes from Andreessen's very famous essay, "How Software is Eating the World." And he's talking about this great revolution in tech. And he's mentioning Zynga, which was the company that launched Farmville, which got people into Facebook in this really sort of parasitic way. That's the sort of product and the outcome of this sort of alchemy and mystique that masks itself as risk in staring into the abyss of death.

GIL: They are very much into mythology and telling these grandiose stories about themselves, and we're going to get to that later in the episode. On this subject of the investments they make, it is interesting how they are going into such ridiculous areas. Remember a couple of years ago when it was non-fungible tokens? Basically you could buy a JPEG of an image and you supposedly owned it and it was worth a lot of money. You had all of these venture capitalists buying these Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, paying $50,000, $100,000. I think some went for much higher than that. And the idea was that you could own these pixels and they would be of increasing value over time. And of course that all kind of collapsed because it made no sense—the idea of owning a digital image that was worth money. Again, like a lot of their stuff, only worth more money if you convince everybody that it's worth even more money, right? This is the scheme of crypto, et cetera. So NFTs are kind of like a perfect example of the weird stuff they're getting into that doesn't make sense. It's not an actual product.

The value is only in the perception. If people think about venture capital at all, they probably think of companies like Airbnb, DoorDash, Instacart, Uber—companies that actually they can interact with that have a certain impact on their life in terms of how they rent a space when they stay in another town or getting their food delivered or the apps that litter the streets of our cities with all these crappy electric scooters that are quite dangerous actually.

The nature of venture capital is changing. And instead of investing in burrito deliveries and room rentals, they're going all in on AI and crypto schemes and chasing after contracts for surveillance and war technologies and AI-powered killer drones. And you say they've also made some shaky investments that will require them to exit through the state. How is VC shifting now? And what does it mean to exit through the state?

OLIVIER: Let me draw a sort of long picture here, but I think it sort of reinforces that, again, this is within the sort of confines of the American state project, such that it exists through the national defense budget and a certain sort of financial elite. And again, I mentioned the dot-com era. We're deregulating finance and telecoms and we're creating this new wealth. And then what are we doing with some of this wealth? Well, the next sort of cycle is, as you've mentioned, it's Airbnb, it's Uber. Fundamentally, these are companies about cannibalizing the public trust.

We are in this next phase in which we've had a couple cycles of crypto and Web3 and NFTs and AI. And again, we're thinking in sort of 10-year cycles of sort of the maturation of funds. And the NFT vision didn't quite... well, it didn't work at all. It was a spectacular failure and the whales ate the krill, as the saying goes, right? The big crypto whales were able to use everyday people as exit liquidity. But it did also help engender and model this idea that like, you are on your own and we are all running pump-and-dump scams in every aspect of our life and social and sort of everyday kind of finance—that we should be like little VCs in miniature, that we should be thinking about pumping our reality through things like prediction markets.

There is a sort of remaking of us by this cannibalizing of the public trust and the hollowing out of the state. And of course, this is where national defense strategies as a backstop for AI infrastructure is really important, or essentially allowing a kind of U.S. Treasury stablecoin rail for the global market. Yevgeny Morozov has recently written about this. If we had to define US imperialism under Trump 47, it's this kind of like combination of Nvidia chips and dark crypto-enabled finance and a kind of like tithing to Silicon Valley and Trump.

Just to sort of step back here, these are guys that present themselves as, you know, the upstart iconoclasts, champion of the free market and all the sort of libertarian values. Behind every sort of libertarian is a big fat government contract. They love to squeal about how the SEC or the state is victimizing them or putting them up on the cross. Sorry, this is a little bit boring, but—

GIL: I like to hear a little bit boring. Make it interesting.

OLIVIER: All right, all right. Well, basically, check this out. So massive VC performs spectacularly against your sort of regular standard public market equivalent fund. The 2011 era is about level, and currently in the last 10 years of VC investing, they are underwater. So they need to get that bag somewhere. And the state under Trump—that's the exit through the state. That's where they're going to get the proper sort of funding for these ridiculous bets on what the future is.

GIL: It seems to me that one of the things that radicalized a lot of these venture capital guys was the Great Recession—near failure of the market in 2008—along with the election of Barack Obama as president. And what you're saying when you say "exit through the state," they expect the government under Trump, especially now, to somehow save them from their bad investments, much as people were saved from their bad investments during the lead-up to the Great Recession. Right. And almost like they're trying to find a way to monetize the mechanism by which if you become too big to fail, the government will have to save you. And seeing that as like the next big parasitic opportunity.

You've described them as parasites. And I think in a way that's what they're trying to do with all of their different schemes is: how can they find a way to get a percentage of everything we do? Every food we eat, every car ride we take, every hotel stay, every opinion we have, right? These prediction markets are now trying to monetize you having an opinion. You can't just have an opinion and share it with your friends and family or online. You have to go and put it on the prediction market and take bets and make money off of it. It's just an utterly ridiculous effort to just financialize everything. And they say that, right? It's "the financialization of everything," which means everything has to be about somehow making money here or there.

I don't think people grasp the degree to which these guys are counting on the government to save them. I think that's completely hidden from view with this idea, the mythology of venture capital, that these guys are just great at inventing the future and finding billions of dollars somehow.

OLIVIER: Obama was a guy who really helped launch this mythology, right? Like this was the answer to the Great Recession—was something like the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, which legalized crowdfunding, gave government matching funds for startups, and in the words of Obama, "allowed everyday retail investors to now invest in the entrepreneurs that they believe in." So Obama was a big deal in helping create the sort of like tech founder CEO king.

It's really hard to know how sincere or hysterical they are. Like, does Peter Thiel sincerely feel like he is so utterly besieged and that the mission of venture capitalism is a kind of civilizational telos, like a kind of saving of Western civilization? Or is everything like a pump and a deep form of cynicism in which there's very few sort of sincere beliefs here? And this is an interesting example. I don't know if you remember Chris Dixon. He wrote this book about the Web3 NFT future that maybe you and I haven't seen yet. It's gonna be this wonderful world and we're immersively sort of freely exchanging on the internet. And he says, "Don't worry about the shitcoins and the meme coins. That's casino. That's the bad stuff. Web3, NFTs—that's computer. And computer is mother. Computer is beautiful."

But I mean, who do I see last week writing lyrically about Kalshi? Chris Dixon, betting on Kalshi, betting in prediction markets, which like, they give casino a bad name. I mean, like this is like casinos on casinos all the way down. So for someone like Chris Dixon, who's out here trying to sort of, as they say, "tell the story" of what investment is and what entrepreneurialism is, again, it's just so instrumental about getting that bag that I don't know if sincerity has anything to do with this space.

GIL: Well, we'll have to bet on it and then we'll have to bet on the bet, and then bet about it, right? Bets on bets. I think there's the answer to our sincerity question today. There was a story in Politico actually—Chris Larsen, this crypto billionaire who co-founded Ripple, is betting on both Katie Porter, a staunch Democrat for California governor, and on Steve Hilton, a right-wing zealot who used to have a show on Fox News for California governor. So he's just betting on both because this is the crypto mentality. Let's just bet everywhere and maybe we'll win something.

One of my favorite hobbies these days is to read descriptions or definitions of what Web3 is. Tell us for people who don't know and who may have heard "Web3," because this is one of these concepts that you hear, but I don't think everyone knows what it is. What is Web3 supposed to be?

OLIVIER: I mean, I guess it's like Second Life or Club Penguin, but like with better VR headsets.

GIL: Let's go 101 here for the Web3 part. Let's go 101.

OLIVIER: If some of y'all remember text-heavy internet—you know, 90s message boards, needing some ability to have some sort of programming language capacity in order to sort of like use the internet—you know, that's sort of like your basic text-driven Web1. Once we have MySpace and Blogger and later Facebook come into the mix, we have this proliferation of tools that allow people to publish and participate in sort of new modes of social media as we know it.

Now the Web3 people and the crypto people and some of the Ethereum blockchain people—I have to try to be as generous as possible—they are able to identify the way in which we have this platform oligarchy in our internet that makes it suck. Honestly, Google, Facebook, they don't really care if they're ruining the product that used to have some level of social or public good. I mean, there was that ProPublica report a couple weeks ago about Facebook knows 10% of its revenue is fraud and they don't really care, right? They're destroying that infrastructure.

And the promise of Web3 was like, "Okay, take your identity, put some kind of Fortnite skin over top of it, some sort of CryptoPunk or ape or whatever it is, and you're gonna leave this space of mediation where you're dependent upon the big players and you're gonna go into this other space in which you enter voluntary contracts with all the different sort of like services that you want. It's not just gonna be just gambling. It's not just gonna be trading in Web3 skins. It's gonna somehow be everything." This is somehow also gonna bleed into like off-world and like restructure our economy.

For the people that wanna live in Second Life, a kind of virtual Burning Man in which you do gift economy stuff—like, okay, fine, I'm not gonna give you a hard time about that. But the reality of course in Web3 is we're just trading in a set of other concentrations for people who hold certain tokens, certain coins. You're trusting somebody else. You're always trusting a larger kind of conglomeration of crypto power rather than Google or Facebook. So it's sort of still like a metaphor. It's still sort of like an ethereal dream space.

GIL: Yeah, getting people into virtual spaces that they mistake for their real lives and where they can spend money. Well, the way I think of it is Roblox. You know, when I give my nine-year-old nephew 30 bucks for his birthday, the first thing he does is blow it all on Roblox cash to buy fake flowers and other implements that I have zero understanding of, but are very, very important to him. The Roblox drama often leads to real-world fights with other kids at school. People have to be kicked off of Roblox for a couple of weeks to learn their lesson. And it's just amazing the degree to which this has been monetized—that my nephew could go buy ice cream, he could go buy something cool that's real, but would rather have fake flowers and fake drama on Roblox.

OLIVIER: I have to divulge, Gil, that I was responsible for having basketball cards banned at my high school. We had a fight over who traded this Cedric Ceballos Michael Jordan Flight Club insert card, 1993-94 Upper Deck. I mean, damn, I could have been a Roblox kid.

GIL: Totally. Well, what I think of—when I was a kid, I used to read a lot of comic books and in the back of the comic books, there were these mysterious ads for a figure called Captain O. You could work with Captain O by selling crappy stuff in this catalog they would send you and you had to go door to door selling Captain O products. And I walked all around Oildale in Bakersfield, California, knocking on doors, trying to get people to buy Captain O products so that I could get enough Captain O points to then trade it in for some crappy chintzy stuff. But the amount of Captain O products I would have had to sell in order to qualify for even a nice toy or game was just astronomical. And so after like, you know, a week of this job of walking around at like nine or 10 years old trying to sell Captain O door to door, I gave up. But it seems like they're finding ways now to create these new digital schemes that are a lot more exciting and that actually require you to give your money. At least Captain O sent me his scam kit for free, but these guys, you got to have a buy-in.

OLIVIER: So that's tokenomics skill. You really do have some talents there. But here's where I think we can actually connect this to what's overall happening in the economy and the kind of progressive layers of financialization, which has led to the prominence of VC, but also popularized that you should be a Web3 token holder. And that token isn't quite a security. It's not quite like a game pass, but it's a stand-in for the future. You're invested in the same sort of grand thinking about the future as VC.

I suppose like we are in this deeply cynical moment, right? And various layers of the sort of gig economy have stripped away the public trust or the notion that the SEC or the FTC should or could do anything good for you. When I try to explain angel investors to my students, I say, "Look, you guys know that guy, Gary Vee, right?" This is the sort of world of hustle and grind that is so ubiquitous. And if you don't really know anything else, you think that this is your chance at getting a generational bag.

So it's Roblox, but then imagining that your Roblox skin is a pass to all this other stuff that you keep hearing about. And people are vulnerable and we want to believe in something—the sort of occult golden goose thing that somehow a switch will flip and we'll get abundance or a climate solution or immortality. We've always been sort of oriented towards belief in that.

GIL: Interesting to me. And "get your bag" or "getting a bag" means getting the big bag of money, the windfall, the jackpot from making some investment. And that's what all scams sell—the idea of a massive windfall for little effort. You just have to be smart enough to see the opportunity, to see the money lying in plain sight if you invest. And it does seem like it's really a society-wide scam. It really makes me think of when you go to a big international city—I think of the Westminster Bridge in London where you see the guys doing the shell game on the ground. Even though everybody knows that's a scam, somehow there's always a crowd of tourists crowded around to play the game. And of course, some of the people playing the game are part of the scam to model the behavior of winning.

But it seems to me that that's largely what venture capital is becoming about these days—this sort of shell game on the sidewalk, because that's what we are, those of us who are not investors. It's like buying a lottery ticket. I mean, I'm sure they're probably tokenizing those too, right? If you're putting all of your hopes that you're going to buy the right lottery ticket, you're going to lose in the end. That money would be better off invested in some other kind of thing.

OLIVIER: I like your thing about the lottery ticket though, because if you do hit the lottery ticket, you need to build a whole sort of mystique and philosophy around how your lottery ticket meant something about your innate ability to understand human nature and technology. The sort of mysticism of buying the lottery ticket that then becomes monopoly for someone like Peter Thiel is to say, "Look, you know, I don't invest in anything that doesn't have the potential to return my whole fund." So therefore, you need to sort of like upsell what that product is and its world-building power. This is the language that Peter Thiel uses—that when a developer creates a new company or program, they are, quote, "building a new world," which they might just be arbitraging the sale of like your bedroom for two nights, right? But no, they think of this in this sort of really grandiose scale, part of the history of California.

I'm actually just reading this great book. It's by Gray Brechin, it's Imperial San Francisco, which is all about as soon as they hit that Pacific Ocean, it's like, "It's not enough. We need a Pacific Empire, we need outer space, we need our new nations."

GIL: The frontier.

OLIVIER: Yeah, yeah. Because the way they imagine and think about returns on investment is 100x, 1000x or whatever. And someone like Naval Ravikant, his whole sort of mystique and aura is that like, "Hey, he put $25,000 in Uber and ended up being," or whatever it was, right? Naval is sort of like an interesting guy that like made a bet and now he's some sort of guru to the whole sort of movement.

GIL: You've said that this investor class is becoming completely blackpilled and nihilistic because they're stuck holding the bag on their failed investments. And so they have to figure out some scam to get out of this, whether it's exiting through government contracts or ripping off all the normies on the tokenization of everything in the world. This desperation is also leading to some ideological extremism, which you hinted at in your last answer. And we talk on this podcast about a lot of the main characters in this ideologically extreme movement—Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, Joe Lonsdale, Naval Ravikant. These are people you mentioned in your speech as well. They'll be in my book.

And speaking of books, you can pre-order Gil's book now: The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. Pre-orders matter, people. Besides, if you love the pod, you'll love the book. Book releases August 4th, 2026. How does this all express itself through the network state?

OLIVIER: This highly ideologically charged guy who's been talking about secession from California and channeling the kind of hysterical sense of being persecuted by regulators, media, Kara Swishers, like some brutal Stalinist or whatever.

GIL: Communists, yeah, communists everywhere.

OLIVIER: Total anti-communist Red Scare stuff, Islamo-leftism, that sort of Lonsdale and Sean Maguire shtick. You've got Jason Calacanis always going on about liberal arts students ruining everything, right? So just complete right-wing froth. But also the other part here is that they're so used to thinking about "my tribe" and "my set of founders and investors" being so aligned that it's like, "You know what, actually, we should just start a country. We should just trade in our own crypto. We are so the source of all value that nothing else is really required. Let's go to a special economic zone, take our Discord and our group chat and turn that into like coins and contracts and the emergence of the state. Let's hyperstitiously pump up the idea that we are the new sort of guiding light of civilization and that we can forge and be that sort of metaphorical city on the horizon," et cetera.

It's a very strange misrecognition of like what makes cities and countries great and how the overall contribution that government and labor make to the creation of value. But they've become so sort of mentally, psychologically detached from the rest of us that they'd also like to be physically and sovereignly separate from the rest of us. Yeah, it's not really worked out, but that's where they're going.

GIL: It makes sense though, because you've described them as autodidacts who don't read—self-taught people who don't read widely, but read a few things and decide, "Well, I'm going to frame my entire life around these things." And "I can now figure out a better way to do America than the founding fathers did and a better way to run society than all of the people in government are doing." And they seem to think that they are philosophers for some reason. And I was actually in a chat with some folks who were very mad about the way the word "philosopher" is being used by the media to describe whatever new tech dweeb has a new crazy idea that'll never work out, right? We're sort of debasing the philosophical field by calling everyone a philosopher.

It does seem that there's a great emptiness. A lot of these guys are billionaires. They have more money than they'll ever need. And most of us could probably envision being quite happy with a lot of money, maybe giving a lot of it away to charities and flitting about on islands and having every kind of convenience and luxury we can afford. And probably that would be a good life for most people. It does seem that the money's not doing them a lot of good. And so they get into these dark visions like living forever or going and living in space or creating their own countries. And Peter Thiel has said that you should run your startup like a cult.

What we're seeing is really a cult of venture capital rising up to impose these pretty extreme visions of the future on everyone else. And I really see the network state as the business plan for that—a way to buy real estate, to tokenize government, to provide society as a service. How serious of a threat do you think the network state is? This is a question I grapple with a lot. People who think, "Well, that's just, that'll never work out" or "Good. Let them do it. Then there won't be a problem anymore." But I don't think people fully understand what the network state vision totally entails because it's not just about a few billionaires having their cult communes. They could already do that today. It's about a much bigger disruption in a way.

Think about it as kind of matching up with your "exit through the state." They want to use the United States as a sort of booster rocket to fuel their exit from our reality. It's not like we'll all get to be here living our same lives when they're done with that. Their vision inherently requires a collapse of our democracy, of our nation-state, just like they've hit the hotel industry or hit the taxi industry. They seek to extract maximum value and exit, but that extraction of value is inherently destructive to our country. So it's not really a case of, "We'll just let them go. Who cares," right? Crystallize for us the deep level of the network state vision.

OLIVIER: The use and abuse of philosophy here—there's a very limited set of texts. Davidson and Rees-Mogg's The Sovereign Individual is probably, and Peter Thiel's Zero to One, that's on the bookshelf of all these guys. There is this sense of, "Yes, the sovereign individual as the source of all value who steels themselves in this very singular way towards a particular vision," which is again, when Balaji says, "Here's how we'll create a network state," he would say to you, Gil, "I need that one idea." Think about Milchick in Severance saying, "Grow, grow, grow"—like just sort of synthesize that quantum idea, that one powerful germ that will explode value and allow your transcendence and freedom as some sort of like tech value-creating god. That's the vision here. Again, totally detached from material reality and from the rest of us.

There's also obviously a looming sense amongst all our sort of capitalist overlords about the destruction that's happening to the planet that they're disinterested in ever thinking about—rather to sort of immaculately conceive of a trillion other AI lifeforms than to care about us. At a more sort of like grounded level, I think Quinn's work obviously is very important here and saying that, "Look, the special economic zone or the charter city is kind of like one of these policy tools that has been in the last 30-plus years." It's one of the sort of few levers that states know how to actually pull in terms of like cleaving off valuable parts of the country and of our sort of like public infrastructure for their own personal fiefdoms. I think that's very real and on the cards.

Part of Canada's response to Trump and tariffs is to like go in this sort of special economic zone route. And as your work has covered, this is kind of a veneration of like the robber baron and the company town and Star City. There's this sort of overbearing sort of ideological dark cloud about an inability to think about a future with us in it. Calacanis was on Twitter the other day about like the AI worker apocalypse. The only solution for everyday people is to be a founder—a world of 8 billion founders. No, I mean, obviously they don't imagine that. It's just basically being a founder and having the right Web3 token pass to the proverbial rocket ship to Mars is kind of what they got in line for us.

I mean, who knows? You've been doing a great job also of sort of charting where some of the fractures are. Are we entering into Trump's lame duck?

GIL: We're entering into Trump's sleepy time, apparently. It's funny that it's almost karmic. He's now Sleepy Don. He accused Biden of being sleepy, but now we just see him falling asleep. I think age is catching up with him. And I think greed is Trump's main motivation, right? He likes to play the dictator, but that would require a lot of work and a high degree of risk that he doesn't really probably feel like taking at age 78 when he's making out like a bandit in so many other ways.

And what I'm noticing is that the tech bros and a lot of the right-wing zealots are starting to freak out. You know, it started with Curtis Yarvin saying, "This is going to fail and we're all going to be in trouble." And now everyone is saying that. Mike Cernovich is saying that. They elected Trump to do the thing and he's not going to do the thing, which is hilarious because you look at Trump's entire history, it's ripping off people who trusted him, right? From his workers to whatever. So he's going to rip them off too, I think, because all of these things he's been doing—sending the troops into cities—he kind of backs off at the end, right? He's mostly doing actual harm to undocumented immigrants and people who can't really fight back within our system. Right? He's not yet shooting Americans down. And there are some people saying that there should be public executions in the country. They want more terrifying drama from Trump and they're just not getting it.

The Trump dictatorship might turn out to be as worthless as an NFT. Although it's still quite scary and destructive and people should be held accountable, but they are starting to freak out a bit, which I take as a good sign. The thing about it is that it's not something that just goes away once Trump is out of the picture, right? It'll keep going because these guys have billions of dollars and they can continue to play the long game here. And I think that they will. So I won't be celebrating when Trump's out and these guys are sneaking around with their tails between their legs because they're going to try again. And as I've said, my fear is that they will over time buy off the Democratic Party, which is very easy to do, and get there on a more slow pace. They saw an opportunity with Trump to really accelerate the process, but hey, who knows? We've got a lot of time between now and the next election.

OLIVIER: Looks like abundance is back on the menu. The Abundance Democrat pivot.

GIL: Totally, they find these ways to sell or create these new frameworks and then Democrats buy it because they want that billionaire money. Let's talk a minute about the herd mentality in venture capital. And you've talked about a clustering effect when all the venture capital firms start to cluster around certain kinds of investments. And right now they seem to be clustering around AI, crypto, surveillance, war technology, network state projects, biotech to some degree—very influential investment sectors. You've got Founders Fund, 8VC, Lux Capital, Andreessen Horowitz. You see the same group of people recurring and a lot of them also overlap with the network state, right? The biggest funders in these powerful technologies that are portrayed as the future of humanity are all deeply involved with this small set of venture capitalists. What is the effect of this clustering and bundling on venture capital and what is it due to our government? What does it do to our economy and what's the effect on our lives?

OLIVIER: I gotta shout out Peter Lee and Professor Hilary Allen for writing about this stuff. But essentially, if everyone is going for the quick and easy returns in crypto, crypto is a thing that mirrors the logic of VC so easily, because it's sort of like you can exit quicker, you can pump a lot quicker. You know, an initial coin offering is like an IPO, right? So there's all these attractive things about crypto. And it also has this ability to arbitrage the state and regulators into making that imaginary sort of Web3 money effectively like something real, something tangible.

In the rush to generative AI, your startup needs to have something about generative AI. You need to become a generative AI startup. I use this example. There's a Balaji and A16Z venture. And the other guy from Replit is an investor in this AI education tool called Synthesis. And it was a startup that was the school for kids that worked at Starlink or something like that. It was like a Star City school, and it was modeled on the great visionary Elon and his sort of approach to education. And it was a sort of very bespoke homeschooling product that involved like real teachers and tutors. And then when Marc Andreessen dropped his AI Optimist Manifesto, "Why AI Will Save the World," he included very particular language about AI tutors. And so Synthesis is like, "Yeah, right, that's what we do. We do AI tutors." Yeah, there are no humans. Boom, gone. You can see the change in their website. You can see how they fundamentally kind of imprint on the vision of like Andreessen as a particular sort of lodestar figure.

So there is this herd mentality about what Marc, Peter, or Michael Moritz or any of these big guys in VC want. There's an impact here on startups thinking about what exactly that Marc or Peter or Michael Moritz is looking for and thinking about replaying back gamification or any of these other sort of key concepts that sort of have defined the history of Silicon Valley. So there's a kind of replaying of the same deals, chasing the easiest returns.

So, you know, one of the things that's so stupid about Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's book or narrative about abundance is: why would you think that capital in America gives a shit about housing? Stripped out all the guardrails that capital would naturally align to human needs? No, it goes to the easiest return. That's why we haven't seen, you know, so-called hard tech except backstopped by the military. Before dot-com, you know, like biotech and health and ICTs are kind of like level pegging. But from there, ICTs take flight because this is sort of like the thing that is defined as the, quote, "new economy."

GIL: Tell us what ICTs are.

OLIVIER: Information communication technologies—your Ciscos and Sun Micros and the rest. Sorry, a very sort of 2000s term. So that's sort of what's happening with AI. We need to be in the AI space. We can't miss out. And in fact, I wouldn't say a revolt at Sequoia Capital, but that South African guy—

GIL: Botha.

OLIVIER: —is no longer the lead partner because he was a little bit bearish on AI. You know, that's the sort of like investor expectation. Hard tech or things that fulfill some sort of social public need is not where VC money flows.

GIL: It does seem like one of their magical powers—their only magical power—they have a lot of money to dangle out for wannabe founders. And this is sort of a funnel for the cult of venture capital as I view it. When Peter Thiel gave his recent Antichrist speeches, most of the people there weren't really interested in his take on Christianity. They wanted to get into the same room with venture capitalists and pitch their ideas. And one guy had an idea for a cross on the moon and another one's an investor in something called sperm racing? Another financialization—put your sperm under a microscope and race it. This is apparently a thing though. This is how insane they have become.

OLIVIER: I would gamble on that by the way, Gil.

GIL: Probably the most apt symbol or metaphor we have for venture capital at this point—financializing masturbation. One thing about the abundance thing, you know, they have one of the visions they have for when all of our jobs are allegedly erased by AI. Everyone will have more then because prices will go down and everybody will somehow get a share of the wealth created by AI. And we won't just create wealth, we'll create extreme wealth for everybody. This is Sam Altman talked about this. And so we're going to have this utopian Shangri-La where AI is not hurting us, it's helping everybody. And 8 billion people in the world will all have a fair share and they can do whatever they want with it and there'll be no more poverty.

The problem with this fairy tale fantasy lie of Altman's is that we already have abundance. It's just not fairly distributed in the world. Most of it is going to a small percentage of people. And so if the people who are the profiteers of our current abundance aren't sharing it now, why the hell are they going to share it in the future? They're not. That's why they're planning to get off the planet. That's why they're planning to live in digital fortress societies. So it's funny to see them pretend as if the future is going to be a techno-socialist Shangri-La when nothing in their behavior suggests that they have any care, as you said, about any of human beings here on earth today.

And I think the fact that a sort of socialist scheme is the best future that Sam Altman can offer people doesn't get enough attention. In addition to this imaginary idea that everything—we should just do on AI now, watch movies made by AI—they are so desperate to find a use case for so many of these things. It's really telling the degree of desperation. And I'm not saying that all artificial intelligence technologies are bad, but what they're trying to push on us is literally the worst face of these things.

OLIVIER: You know, part of what made Sam accidentally the sort of maven of this future—again, they released ChatGPT and it was unexpectedly a hit and it had 80 million users in a month and then that's ballooned to, what are we, they're saying something like 800 million, whatever it is. That's the sort of like key story of like, "Right, you show that you've got the potential to like dominate market share and monopolize that." And then somehow like the network effect will kick in and you'll just kind of reap these monopoly profits.

Now that can't happen with AI because of the material and energy demands. It's totally crazy. What Sam and those companies can do is really fuck with us in terms of reimagining what it is to be human and what relationships we should have to chatbots essentially. And so create that desire and create that necessity. So much of the offsetting of VC investment in these 10-year cycles is like saying, "No, you're going to need to have a personal sort of servant deliver your treats at your doorstep." That's gonna be a future need, a future necessity that's non-negotiable.

When you heard that little maniac from Kalshi talk about prediction markets, he's like, "And that is a consumer habit that will not be undone." And that's what Sam and the rest of them are doing with Generative AI is, "Well, we don't really have like great business cases, there's not great rates of return for businesses that adopt pilot projects, but we can like, I don't know, like re-engineer humanity." That sounds a bit extreme, but that's fundamentally what this experiment is.

And even when they like release information about like, "Turns out that X amount of users were having psychotic episodes or mental health crises using our product," it's like saying, "We now control that core important data about what this question is." So much the same way that like you put Lime scooters everywhere on the street and see if you can make this a sustainable business once you plow through the cash.

GIL: The strongest through line in your work is the connection between the structural economic crises and the ecological crisis facing our planet and the rise of this fascist tech ideology. And it isn't coincidental, it's cause and effect, right? They are seeing crisis ahead and instead of solving the crisis, as you said earlier, they want to capitalize on the crisis. It's sort of Naomi Klein's disaster capitalism at a meta level. How do we capitalize on the destruction of the planet? How do we capitalize on the destruction of democracy? How do we capitalize on the destruction of humanity itself? So what's at stake? What do people need to understand as a closing word? What venture capital is really about and what it means for our future.

OLIVIER: Well, you said the word. It's the foreclosing of our future. It's breaking free from this idea that we will be in the sort of Total Recall Mars colony, right? Like if we want some sort of humane future, then we need to bring it back under some kind of democratic control. If we're staying in a capitalist system, there's nothing inherently wrong about making 10-year risky bets in sort of frontier tech, as they like to call it. Those questions about where those bets lie and for whom those interests and those bets will pay off is highly concentrated in Silicon Valley, highly because of the sort of sociological and economic reasons concentrated around the kind of frothy feverish vision of apocalypse.

California is just so fascinating. Eric Davis wrote about this. It has always been a kind of like hotbed of religion, new religion and technology, that the frontier was always sort of like a techno frontier. Yeah, that is about questions of US imperialism. And while the EU is not in any way sort of a bulwark or, you know, it's a pittance in terms of what they're trying to do to sort of have some kind of sovereignty over what tech might look like there, that would be pretty useful. But I just think just sort of framing the question overall is reclaiming our future from the tech oligarchy. That's it. That's what's at stake.

GIL: It's an important thing to do. And I think hopefully in the coming years, venture capital will get a lot more attention from people because it's not just a bunch of investors. It's a bunch of political schemers. It's people who want to rewrite the future. Venture capital is not about innovation. Venture capital is about power.

It is funny their obsession with California, which they portray both as heaven—the home of Silicon Valley—and hell because it's liberal governance, et cetera. And if you look at the things that come out of California, a lot of good things have come out of California, a lot of innovations. You know, it's the breadbasket of the nation and the world. But we also are like the ground zero for cults. And in a way, I think of these guys as yet another cult rising up out of California. A lot of them are now doing psychedelics and talking about biblical themes. That's what Charles Manson did. Network State—we had a guy named Jim Jones who started his own thing called Jonestown and a bunch of people died there. It was in Latin America where a lot of the venture capitalists are concentrating their colonial scheme.

So it's amazing how by trying to invent the future, they're simply reinventing things we've already seen before. The Gold Rush, for instance, right? So they're basically a mix of the Gold Rush, Charles Manson, and Jim Jones. So if you want to understand venture capital, there you go.

OLIVIER: But don't forget, and just to put on my weird hat, CIA torturer Dan Mitrione was the guy that helped broker the deal for Jim Jones to Guyana. Gotta throw the spooks in there too.

GIL: Yeah, exit through the state, right? Anyway, Olivier, thanks for joining us today. And I'm sure we'll talk again sometime soon.

OLIVIER: Thanks so much, Gil. Really looking forward to the book. Your book, not mine.

OUTRO (R.R. ROBBINS): And on that excellent segue by Olivier, I'll remind you again to pre-order Gil's book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, wherever you get your books. Catch Olivier's excellent lecture in its full format at http://www.youtube.com/scholastics.

The Nerd Reich is written and hosted by Gil Duran. It's edited and produced by me, R.R. Robbins. Also, it's a new year and a new chance to sign up for the newsletter. Go to thenerdreich.com and become a paid member today. For those with visual sensitivities—yes we read the comments—we recommend our audio-only version of the pod. Go to Spotify.com or anywhere you get your audio podcasts.

Today's final words from Dorothy Parker: "If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to."

See you next time.

Tech billionaires in California are furious. A new proposal for a wealth tax on the super rich has them packing their bags and threatening to leave the Golden State for good.

Again.

Oligarchs regularly make such threats and fail to follow through, so we must take such antics with a grain of salt. But the possibility of a new tax on super wealth shows that backlash against the fat cat class is coming, and the billionaires’ threats to flee show just how much they fear fairness and accountability.

The Service Employees International Union-United Health Workers union is pushing a ballot measure to impose a one-time 5% tax on California billionaires. If approved by voters, it would apply retroactively to anyone living in the state on January 1, 2026.

The New York Times reports that some California billionaires are looking for a quick exit:

Billionaires including Peter Thiel, the tech venture capitalist, and Larry Page, a co-founder of Google, are considering cutting or reducing their ties to California by the end of the year because of a proposed ballot measure that could tax the state’s wealthiest residents, according to five people familiar with their thinking.

Page (net worth: $258 billion) would owe $12 billion, reports the NYT, while Thiel would owe $1.2 billion. About 200 billionaires total would contribute roughly $100 billion to offset the federal budget cuts their preferred political project is about to unleash on the country, according to the union.

While the measure is not yet on the ballot, the billionaires are panicking. And they have a powerful ally: California governor Gavin Newsom, the former right-wing podcaster who is running for president in 2028. Newsom “is raising money for a committee to oppose the measure,” per the NYT. (So thoughtful of Newsom to come to the aid of the poor suffering billionaires at this particular time in history.)

Billionaires regularly threaten to abandon California. It’s a go-to move any time they don't like a law or policy. The right-wing media, like Chicken Little, has spent decades crying that the sky is falling in California. “Everyone leaving California” is one of their favorite storylines.

In 2021, Thiel was among the tech billionaires who supposedly relocated to Florida as part of a great Silicon Valley migration. He even spent $18 million on two mansions in Miami Beach.

“Thiel has joined a growing list of high-profile business leaders leaving California to move their businesses elsewhere over the course of the pandemic,” reported Fox.

But now he’s back in Los Angeles. In reality, he just couldn’t quit California.

If the billionaires are this scared, we can assume that polls show strong support for the tax. A recent poll by the Economist/YouGov found that 60% of Americans think billionaires don't pay enough in taxes and 80% think rich people have too much power. Those numbers will likely be much higher in California.

Even Ro Khanna, Silicon Valley’s congressman, has jumped on the bandwagon.

“I echo what FDR said with sarcasm of economic royalists when they threatened to leave, ‘I will miss them very much,’” Khanna, who is cozy with some of the worst billionaires in tech, wrote on X.

This drew howls of protest from several tech zillionaires, who are now threatening to fund a primary challenge against him.

A ballot measure targeting California billionaires could put a white-hot spotlight on the Silicon Valley oligarchs backing the fascist Trump regime. Names will be named, faces will be flashed onto millions of screens. Voters will get a chance to flex their power over the billionaires who currently have their claws around the throat of American democracy.

These billionaires have openly supported Trump’s authoritarian regime because they can’t fathom the idea of being held accountable for their actions. But the future is coming fast, and with it a tremendous backlash against the evils and excesses of Silicon Valley.

If I have one criticism of this proposal, it’s that the tax doesn't go far enough. It’s quite modest compared to the scale of wealth extraction we’re witnessing and the existential threat these billionaires pose to democratic governance. But it’s a start.

Tech billionaires have operated for too long in a consequence-free environment. They’ve broken our laws, invaded our privacy, polarized our society, and harvested our data. They’ve funded authoritarian movements, promoted techno-feudal governance models, and actively worked to dismantle democratic institutions.

To save democracy and freedom, we must galvanize a popular movement to defeat billionaire power. We need a French Revolution—with taxes instead of guillotines.

The sooner, the better.

Tech Dreams of Britain

Peter Thiel has apparently pivoted from Antichrist warnings to a new theme. From the New York Times:

This month, Mr. Thiel held a Christmas party at his Hollywood Hills mansion, where guests talked with him about the implications of the potential California ballot initiative, said two attendees, who were not authorized to speak publicly. The party’s theme was all things Britain, the country that American revolutionaries revolted against in 1775 over taxation.

US tech billionaires do seem to have an interesting obsession with the United Kingdom. Elon Musk has been regularly inserting himself into UK politics, inflaming anti-immigrant attitudes and warning of civilizational decline.

“Violence is coming to you,” Musk said in a speech to a far-right anti-immigrant rally in England, calling for “revolutionary government change.”

Thiel guru Curtis Yarvin has become a regular visitor across the pond, where his rambling screeds have found some new fans among posh fascist types. Meanwhile, Yarvin has raised the prospect of fleeing into exile once the Trump regime collapses.

And now Yarvin has a prominent new convert in the UK: Former prime minister Liz Truss. During an interview with Yarvin for her new podcast, the woman who only lasted 44 days as the UK’s top leader gave Yarvin’s anti-democracy ideas her full-throated endorsement. Truss said the UK government needs a dramatic change—a full reboot.

“I agree with you, having spent 10 years in the system, you need to start from scratch,” Truss told Yarvin.

“If we want to fix Britain, we must reclaim executive power,” read the liner notes for Truss’ interview with Yarvin, titled “Britain’s Broken State.” “Liz interviews tech visionary and political thinker Curtis Yarvin. They discuss how to dismantle the deep state Blob and restore a decisive, sovereign Parliament to drive real change.”

Readers in the UK assure me that no one takes Truss seriously. After all, this is the prime minister who was famously outlasted by a head of lettuce. But keep an eye on Silicon Valley oligarchs and their ilk as they take a more intense interest in UK politics in 2026.

After all, much of the tech fascist ideology was incubated there.

Musical Interlude

Should five percent appear too small/Be careful I don’t take it all

When venture capitalists start preaching and preachers start talking crypto, you know democracy’s in deep trouble.

Silicon Valley extremists and religious extremists are finding plenty of common ground these days. Both groups see themselves as destined to rule, they have similar strategies for taking control, and they are working with Trump to seize the institutions of democratic power.

Peter Thiel’s guru, Curtis Yarvin, calls these institutions the “Cathedral” and says they must be remade as tools of authoritarian power.

A powerful group of religious extremists calls these institutions the “Seven Mountains.” And they push the Seven Mountains Mandate, which calls for seizing these pillars of influence in society to remake the USA as a Christian nation.

Silicon Valley fascism and Christian nationalism both seek to build the same bleak authoritarian future. And JD Vance is the linchpin.

Welcome to the latest episode of the Nerd Reich Podcast. Today’s guests:

• Professor Matthew Boedy, author of The Seven Mountains Mandate: Exposing the Dangerous Plan to Christianize America.
• Kiera Butler, a national correspondent at Mother Jones who has written about the Network State and Christian Nationalist movements.

Listen →

• Listen to the Nerd Reich podcast on Apple
• Listen to the Nerd Reich podcast on Spotify

Available wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript below.

Thank You To Our Sponsors!

The Nerd Reich podcast is made possible by paid subscribers. If you can, please help us to keep this newsletter paywall-free in 2026. Click here to join 759 fellow readers in becoming a paid subscriber today!

Network State Meets The Seven Mountains Mandate: JD Vance, Charlie Kirk, The Rise of The Theo Bros

Transcripts may contain errors.

Gil Duran: Silicon Valley venture capitalists are now quoting scripture—and Christian nationalists are now pitching network state cities. So you know things are getting bizarre. But here's the thing: It makes perfect sense because it's a strategy, and it's spelled out in black and white.

In his book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country, Balaji Srinivasan identifies evangelical Christians as followers of the so-called "Red God"—right-wing Republicans who will ally with his gray tribe of tech billionaires.

Together, they'll crush Democrats, democracy, and the nation state. It's a clinical, almost contemptuous framing of Christianity as a political weapon. But it works because both Christian nationalism and tech fascism share the same playbook: seize the pillars of democratic society and replace them with parallel alternatives, all run by authoritarian elites. The Christian nationalists call it the Seven Mountains mandate—taking over government, media, education, business, arts, family, and religion.

The tech authoritarians call it replacing the cathedral with parallel institutions. Different language, same goal: elite minority rule and the end of democracy as we know it. Today on the Nerd Reich podcast, we expose how this alliance actually works.

I'm joined by Matthew Boedy, author of the definitive book on the Seven Mountains mandate, who explains how figures like Charlie Kirk and other religious extremists have been systematically organizing this takeover.

And Mother Jones reporter Kiera Butler takes us inside Highland Rim—a proposed settlement on the Tennessee-Kentucky border that's basically a network state for Christian nationalists. It comes complete with crypto and investments from the same venture capital networks funding Silicon Valley's dreams of exiting democracy.

She's tracked how this convergence flows through figures like JD Vance, who sits at the nexus of the Theo Bros and Tech Bros—Rockbridge Network and American Reformer, venture capital and Christian nationalism.

It's an unholy alliance of Christian theocracy and tech fascism that sees the destruction of democracy as a high moral calling. The question isn't whether they're working together. They are. The question is whether the American people will wake up to the threat on their doorstep.

Part One: Matthew Boedy on the Seven Mountains Mandate

Gil Duran: Matthew Boedy, thanks for joining us today on the Nerd Reich podcast. So let's start with some background about your focus and your work. In 2016, you were placed on a Turning Point USA Professor Watchlist, which led you to become an expert on this particular area of Christian nationalism and the threat that it poses to democracy. So tell us about that experience, how it changed your life, and how it puts you on the path to your book, The Seven Mountains Mandate: Exposing the Dangerous Plan to Christianize America and Destroy Democracy.

Matthew Boedy: Indeed, it's been a crazy couple of years and even the last few months, obviously, since Charlie's death. So in 2016, Turning Point—which at that point very few people knew who that organization was—they decided to go viral with a list of professors they didn't like. There were about 100 originally that they put on the list and I was one of them because I wrote an opinion piece for the local newspaper advocating against allowing concealed firearms on college campuses, which is now a law in Georgia. So we lost that battle.

And to be honest with you, I wrote that op-ed, I forgot about it, and then we lost. And then months later, Turning Point puts me on a list. And to be honest with you, I didn't pay much attention to the list at that point either. And many people, I think, were much smarter than me at that point—noticing not just the professor hatred on it, but the McCarthyism and all that.

And so as time went on, certainly being on a list like that draws attention to you. I'm a professor at a school very few people have heard of in Georgia and I teach English, which is not a big subject. So being on the list gave me some identity. And then I started writing about Charlie Kirk. It became a hobby for me, you know, starting a fact-check blog and trying to keep up with all the things he was saying. But to be honest with you, it was a hobby.

So around the time the pandemic hit, he and Turning Point switched from a more libertarian, we'll say, chamber of commerce conservative—"national debt" kind of mantra—to a Christian nationalism theme. And that put it squarely in my research agenda as a professor. I knew exactly what they were saying. I understood what Charlie was saying when he came out to CPAC in 2020 and said that Donald Trump was the first president to understand the seven areas of cultural influence, which I'm sure we'll go through the list here.

So it became less of a hobby and more of an urgency for me to not just write a fact-check blog, but to write many things to make people aware of Turning Point. Even in 2020, people were kind of unaware. They thought Charlie was just merely a college campus organizer or college campus debater. I mean, he had a big podcast at that point, but really it took a couple of years for Turning Point to expand from those things. So yeah, I've become the expert on Turning Point and Charlie Kirk. And as you imagined in the last few months, I've done hundreds of media interviews about the expansive nature of Turning Point. So I got started by—some people asked me, why did you start on Turning Point? Well, they started on me first.

Gil Duran: That makes a lot of sense. You were sort of thrust into it, as we all have been in this era where we're having to learn about a lot of things that might have seemed like strange ideas before, but that have suddenly become real and palpable threats to democracy. I'm assuming that a lot of our listeners and viewers have not heard of the Seven Mountains mandate, or if they have heard of it, they don't really know much about it. So let's get into the basics of that. And I'm going to start with the first line of your book.

The plan to Christianize America began 50 years ago with a vision from God. There's been a lot of strange visions, biblical visions going around lately. I've done a lot of writing about Peter Thiel giving his sermons on the Antichrist. And that's what really brought me around to your work—realizing the symmetry between some of what I'm writing about in the tech world and what's happening over in the Christian nationalist world, and both are now starting to very clearly merge.

The founders of the Seven Mountains Mandate believe they received a divine message to Christianize the United States. And they would do this by seizing control of the country's main institutions as part of a massive spiritual war against demonic control—to clear these areas of demonic control and bring forth the kingdom of God. And I want you to unpack that for us. But first, who were the founders of the Seven Mountains Mandate? What were their visions? And what are those seven mountains?

Matthew Boedy: The second line of the book is also important: "Or so the legend goes." Two people—Bill Bright, who was the founder of Campus Crusade from California, and a guy named Loren Cunningham, who founded a global mission organization called Youth with a Mission—were friends back in the '70s. And not just starting out—they started their organizations in the '50s. So they were trying to expand and really go beyond college campuses.

They got together in August 1975 in Colorado. One was on vacation, one was giving a speech, and they wanted to talk with each other. And the legend, the divine revelation message goes that each of them got a list from God of these seven areas that they should Christianize. One came in with it written on a piece of paper, and the other one came in with it typed, and they gave it to each other at the same time. And it was a "divine appointment," as Loren Cunningham calls it.

So this list though of seven places is not a divine revelation. These lists—if you were to think of the cultural institutions in our nation, you could probably name all seven without blinking. They're in textbooks. They didn't need God to tell them these lists. But the idea that they wanted to—one, that these areas were already under demonic control or under anti-Christian forces, that's part of the Seven Mountains mandate. And the other part of course is taking them back.

Really it began with this idea of what do we do with the alumni of our two groups. Bill Bright, being Campus Crusade, had a bunch of college students who were going into the world. What do you do with those alumni? And the same thing with Youth with a Mission. These are teenagers sent around the world to spread the gospel. Once they come back, what do you do with them?

And so the idea was to, in some manners, try to find pathways for them to operate. So they wanted to influence—and I want to emphasize that word, influence—America for Jesus. As time went on, this list became more prominent with spirituality and spiritual warfare, became more—less of a list and more of a mandate. And so that's why it became known as the Seven Mountains Mandate.

So the list of the seven—I always leave one off, so I'm gonna try to list them here: the Mountain of Education, the Mountain of Government, the Mountain of Religion, the Mountain of Family, the Mountain of Business, the Mountain of Media, and the Mountain of Entertainment. The metaphor of the mountains came several years later. They called them "areas" or "spheres," but it took a couple of decades for this thing to spread and eventually became the Seven Mountains after a guy named Lance Wallnau—who was famously writing about Trump a couple of years ago—met Loren Cunningham around 2000, and Loren Cunningham had shared with him this list.

And Lance was like, "I've never heard this before." So he was looking for an idea to pitch his own ministry. So he came up with this metaphor of the mountain. So he's often known as the father of the modern Seven Mountains movement. But the two people who came up with the list are Bill Bright and Loren Cunningham.

I want to mention, I guess, a fourth person. His name is Francis Schaeffer. He was an American theologian, writer, big into the culture wars in the '70s and '80s. And he is also credited with giving this list a lot of cache. Now he didn't—he was not at that meeting in August 1975. But these people, these other two people latched onto him because in the '70s and '80s, he was much bigger than these other two people. So they often suggested that he was part of the list or he came up with his own list.

So Loren Cunningham, Bill Bright, Francis Schaeffer, and Lance Wallnau are the group of people that can be credited with this list and they spread it through different means. But the idea is that there are demonic forces, anti-Christian forces who control these areas—individuals who are anti-Christians, but also institutional powers that need to be retaken for Jesus.

So as you can see, some of them are pretty straightforward. Mountain of Government—electing people to office does not just mean electing them to the federal, you know, Congress and president's office, it's also state and local. So once they get into office, implementing Christian policies. Now the other mountains are much of a long game. The Mountain of Education is a great example. For decades now, conservative Christians have been trying to implement voucher systems or taking public money to pay for private schools, to getting people out of public schools because they believe they're demonic. But now they want to go back into public schools and take them back over.

So it's been a long game for several of these mountains. But now I believe with the rise of Turning Point USA, Turning Point has become the indispensable organization for the Seven Mountains mandate. They have spread themselves, expanded themselves in the last couple years to each of the seven areas. There's an arm of Turning Point for each of the Seven Mountains. And that's why I write in the book that Turning Point's the heir to Loren Cunningham and Bill Bright and Francis Schaeffer and Lance Wallnau.

Gil Duran: So the idea is to Christianize the country by seizing the pillars of influence and turning them into this evangelical Christian nationalist movement, making them the powerful influence of society. And in the work I do on the tech fascists who are trying to gain power under Trump, we have this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who has this idea called "the cathedral," which is that there are these certain institutions of society that are the basis of democracy. And not only that, but of communist control of the country. And what we must do is purge the communists and seize control of the cathedral or break it down and rebuild it as something else.

So it's interesting to me that Yarvin uses the metaphor of a cathedral of democracy that has to be torn down and replaced, whereas the people you're writing about—the Seven Mountains mandate, the Christian nationalists—want to actually impose the church on top of the state to make the state part of the church, right?

Matthew Boedy: Yeah, I want to point out the cathedral image obviously is kind of Catholic and maybe some Protestants, but the people involved with the Seven Mountains group is charismatic, evangelical. They don't have cathedrals or use the word cathedral a lot, but they're very interested in making the church the center of America. Some people in the group call it making the church "the command center" to run the culture.

And very specifically, it is a minority movement on purpose, and this is why it's anti-democratic. It's a minority movement because they want to install a minority of people to run these institutions. So when I say Christianize America, we do not mean to evangelize, to make the majority of people claim Jesus as their savior. We're talking about a minority movement on purpose because they believe they have the truth.

So back to the cathedral thing—it is about the church, it is about religious disruption of society, if you want to use a tech word. It is about apocalyptic thinking, that is, changing things very fast, perhaps with a divine power, but also doing it in such a way that the majority of the people don't follow it or don't want it.

Gil Duran: You know, Steve Bannon likes to say that he's a Leninist, right? And if you look at what he means by that, the idea being that you need an elite vanguard that is pure and true believer to take over and run things. And this is why you get authoritarianism with communism, right? It's this idea they seem to basically have adopted that same thing. With the tech guys, they see this rule by elites—democracy is over. We can't let everybody decide. We need to impose from the top down what the system will be. Basically they're talking about theocracy.

So if it's a minority movement, why should people care? Explain to us why a movement that is so minoritarian has power. Where do you see it popping up? Why should people be afraid of this?

Matthew Boedy: Yeah, so in a democracy, right, we think the majority rules, but there are protections for the minority. But the Seven Mountains mandate specifically says, and Charlie Kirk said this before he was killed, right: "We're not a democracy, we are a republic." And that republic has values and traditions and things that should be in place. And the only way to keep them in place is this elite that you're talking about. So they may be the minority, but once they have power—perhaps gotten through democratic means of being elected—they will use that power in anti-democratic means. So that's why we should care, one.

And then two, the people that don't agree with them, and this is the majority of the rest of us, will lose many of our rights. So in a republic, the First Amendment may not apply. Charlie Kirk has said in the past that the First Amendment and the founding fathers' idea of the First Amendment was not a religious pluralistic society. It was so that the federal government would not choose between Protestant sects, between Protestant, Baptist, Methodist, things like that. And at the state level, there was no freedom of religion. States could decide that they wanted to be a Christian state.

So very much if that comes to pass, you will lose religious pluralism, the ability perhaps to practice your religion. But also the interesting thing about the Seven Mountains and the way that it has changed over the years—it becomes much more aggressive, much more militaristic and more toward the end times that we have to do this now and we have to do certain things now to win. And one of those things often is silencing, putting away, erasing voices of people that they don't agree with.

If you think about the Mountain of Family, for example, that's traditional definition of family—men and women marrying, having kids at a young age. And that means of course eliminating a lot of other voices. So I write about Turning Point USA as not just saying these things on a podcast or on the radio show—they're out ambushing people at a Walmart in Nebraska who is a transgender person. They're out ambushing professors at Arizona State who go to drag shows. They're protesting drag queen story hours at libraries.

So they very much try to take the fight back in the culture war that they believe Christians have not fought. So their pitch to Christians is: you've been passive, you've just been interested in the gospel, we need to fight back because we're losing our culture, our country. And that's very much why everyone should care about it. It is not just minority shrieking. They very much want to act in many ways.

Gil Duran: Who are some of the most prominent supporters who have power?

Matthew Boedy: House Speaker Mike Johnson is an advocate of the Seven Mountains mandate. So you can see obviously a lot of power that he has. Now, if you think about the president, you know, I did say Charlie Kirk came out and said that Donald Trump is the first president to understand the seven areas of influence. Now, I don't think he understands the seven areas of influence, but there are people around him, especially his evangelical Christian advisory board. Paula White—Kane, his female advisor from the first administration and really popular now in the second administration—is also an advocate of this.

So there are many people around him that will push him in directions that he initially did not want to go. And Charlie Kirk was certainly one of them. He was a political kingmaker. He obviously was very close to the Trump family and all members of the Trump family. And he pushed along with JD Vance, many policies that the Seven Mountains mandate group would agree with.

So JD Vance is a second one. Now he ties in more with the people you've mentioned, being Roman Catholic, not being evangelical. But if you tie the nerd reich people you've been talking about with the evangelical charismatic Charlie Kirk group you've been talking about, that is a very powerful base of people who individually may influence the individual president. There's a survey in the book done by some scholars who said that, I think, 35% of Americans would advocate for or agree with specifically the Seven Mountains mandate. They put that into a survey.

Gil Duran: The stuff you're talking about—you mentioned JD Vance—he does seem to be a bridge between the worlds of religious extremism and the tech world. Now he chose to be one of these sort of converted extremist Catholics who is—I mean, I was born Catholic—so you get these converts who are suddenly more aggressive and militant than anyone else who's actually been a part of the religion since birth. And that's always odd. There's a lot of jokes about how it's the Catholic converts who want to quote all these Popes from 500 years ago and find the most arcane things to justify their extremism rather than maybe paying attention to the words of Jesus Christ, which are very far away from this kind of warlording and bigotry that they seem so fond of.

But it does seem to me that what's coming together is a sort of coalition of people who have very similar ideas. And the core idea being that democracy is outdated and it's not going to get them to where they want to go. That is very much what Peter Thiel's Antichrist speech is about. You know, he talks about the work of Carl Schmitt, who was a Nazi philosopher who said that politics is mainly about the friend-enemy distinction. So they seem to be forming the friends on the side of the people who are using apocalyptic religious moral justifications to fuel their anti-democratic schemes.

That to me is very concerning and very telling. And maybe there needs to be an eighth mountain, which would be the technology stack that they're adding with crypto, surveillance, defense technology, social media, which is helping them sort of achieve all of this because these guys have that on their side—or so they think that they can control the technology, they can create the money. You know, do you run across these tech guys at all in your work or are they mostly staying away? 'Cause I know there's also some tension between the more evangelical Christian nationalists who can see very clearly that these tech guys are actually pretty damn godless, you know, and they're about things like transhumanism and they're not exactly lifting up the words or the ideas of Christ.

Matthew Boedy: Charlie Kirk pushed a conspiracy theory about transhumanism and the ideas of that, so I would not think that he would go along with any version of that. But I think he was a bridge between these people. And now that he's gone, we see these differences coming into much more clear focus. I think that Charlie Kirk was an evangelical whisperer. He spoke their language, but he was also able to work at the level of not just Silicon Valley and big donors, but also the level of JD Vance in terms of politicians and donors and things like that.

So I think that if he were alive, he would be doing that more. So I think this division will stay with us for a while. So there's not necessarily a battle of who's going to win, who's going to have influence. They're both going to have influence. But I do think in terms of like the Seven Mountains mandate, the history of it shows me they've always tagged along to bigger ideas and bigger people. As I mentioned, Loren Cunningham and Bill Bright working with Francis Schaeffer, but all these other people tagged along to issues and ideas and made it part of the Seven Mountains.

The Mountain of Business is a great one. They tagged along with capitalism and free markets and made that a spiritual idea. So they'll continue to do that. And I think this is one reason why we'll see they won't be in competition so much as working together.

Gil Duran: And it seems this is an interesting part about the Seven Mountains mandate—is that it's not some organized thing where there's like one leader. It's more of a stochastic movement. I've seen it described as like a meme more than an organized thing. It's sort of like mimetic warfare. People might agree with it and espouse it without even knowing what it is fully. This is different than traditional evangelical beliefs, right? It takes a different path. How would you describe the difference between normal evangelicals and people who have been radicalized into the Seven Mountains mandate? And what's the relationship to the New Apostolic Reformation movement?

Matthew Boedy: I think the difference between the Seven Mountains people and what we call traditional evangelicals is that traditional evangelicals are just concerned with the gospel—that they're called evangelicals because they evangelize. So the Seven Mountains people will go to this group and say the gospel is more than just the four spiritual laws from Bill Bright or more than just the words of Jesus in the New Testament—that we need a Christian culture to evangelize better.

And that goes back to the majority versus minority thing. They're interested in the gospel, the Seven Mountains people, but they're more interested in the institutional level. So if you think about evangelicals working at the individual level to convert individuals, whether one-on-one or en masse crusades like Billy Graham, the Seven Mountains people work at the institutional level. So they're not exactly at odds, but at the same time, there are some theological differences there.

And I think also with the NAR, that is a group named by Peter Wagner, who was definitely a founder, a father of the Seven Mountains movement. And it's a self-proclaimed group of apostles and prophets. They also though, one of the things they did early on was attack churches—like denominations and groups—"you aren't doing church right, you aren't being Christian enough, you aren't spreading the Seven Mountains," if you will. So they form their own networks.

Now these networks are very large and the NAR is a global organization. So the Seven Mountains is a global idea. By doing that, they set themselves up as—it makes it hard to link with evangelicals. So they've been spreading among charismatics. There is some Catholics, Seven Mountains people, but I think really the idea is reenergizing the generations of people who were brought into politics by Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority—their children or their children's children—and saying, we need to do this again because we haven't won all that we want to win.

And that's really been the route that Charlie Kirk took—speaking to charismatic churches, speaking to evangelical churches. And I think that while certainly Charlie had a bunch of NAR people speak at Turning Point events, there was no mention of NAR. They didn't name them as New Apostolic Reformation people. They just allowed them to speak. And one of them, of course, is Ché Ahn, who is now running for governor of California.

So they kind of smoothed over any connection with them, but they were always linked with them. And I think also because of the dispersed nature of the network, you needed a group or a person like Charlie Kirk to be that hub. And this is why I suggest that Turning Point is the heir to this NAR group. They were able to bring everybody in and train them, organize them—not just politically, but socially and culturally, doing biblical citizenship training—and then spread them out again. So they were really the workhorse of the organization. Turning Point is still the most important organization for the Seven Mountains and I think it will continue. I think it will thrive.

Gil Duran: So it's really a full-on strategy, right? To seize these pillars, but also with Charlie Kirk to reach young people and activate them at a time when religion has been on the decline in the United States, right? It's an attempt to reverse that trend and not only to get people into religion and Christianity, but into a radically politicized version of it. And Charlie Kirk was really the main figure there and he was killed—was it a couple of weeks before your book came out?

Matthew Boedy: Yeah, so he was killed on the 10th of September. My book officially came out on the 30th. But to be honest with you, it was in people's mailboxes that day that he was killed. Many people reviewed it online going, "I got this in the mail" and blah, blah, blah. So it's been a strange time.

Gil Duran: Tell us about his evolution. He wasn't always so overtly into this religious Seven Mountains type of approach. What changed and when did he come into the fold?

Matthew Boedy: I think the best way to describe it is he met Rob McCoy. Rob McCoy is a former megachurch pastor from California, former city councilman—he ran for state senate. He was a prototypical Christian nationalist pastor trying to influence politics from the pulpit. By happenstance perhaps or by targeting, he met Charlie Kirk in 2019.

At that point, this is eight years—or seven, if I do the math correctly—of Turning Point's existence. They started officially in 2012 when Charlie graduated high school. For those seven years, their first big project was "Big Government Sucks." Their next project was ending the national debt. They did these campus tours. They did the "Debate Me, Prove Me Wrong" campus tabling events. And they were mainly limited to this college student conservative grouping.

What Rob McCoy convinced Charlie was that you could take his evangelical faith, which he's always identified as that, and expand it into politics. A year earlier, before they met, Charlie had said, "No, I don't mix my religion and politics. I make secular arguments for my political policies because America is a secular nation." A year later, after talking with Rob McCoy, he's now saying things like "America is a Christian nation. It was born a Christian nation and we should have Christian policies."

So you can see the influence of Rob McCoy. It didn't take that much for Rob McCoy to convince Charlie to make this turn, even though it seems like a 180. While personally Charlie did turn from advocating against religion and politics mixing to advocating for it, he also saw it—it was presented to him as a tremendous business opportunity for Turning Point. It expanded the audiences and markets of Turning Point significantly beyond the college students into churches now.

And not just churches with young people, but churches of all ages. If you go to a Turning Point event that they have in Arizona or Florida, I mean, it's majority of people over the age of 22. Rob McCoy presented this as a way to expand Turning Point or get his message out to all these people. He introduced him to many charismatic pastors or pastors in his denomination. And it just kind of snowballed from there.

I think that also Charlie's close relationship with Donald Trump helped out immensely. You know, he was not an early supporter, but he jumped on the train pretty quickly in the first administration. By 2020, when the pandemic hit, Donald Trump had appeared at Turning Point events several times. I think he's done it 30 times now since he initially did it. I think the combining of Donald Trump's presence and power and all the people around him with the new audiences and the new markets just made Turning Point what it is today.

Gil Duran: In my work, I've increasingly come to think of the people I write about—whose version of the Seven Mountains mandate is called the Network State or the Cathedral—they have a few names for it. As a cult, you know, a small group of people with a really radical belief system, but with also the power to spread those beliefs. And, you know, often things that start small can become a lot bigger. So we do have to watch smaller movements as they grow because that's how a lot of things happen. The American Revolution, Christianity itself was a small cult for a long time and one probably would have not thought 2000 years ago that it would become a major world religion. So things do grow and become bigger.

One of the ways that the Seven Mountains mandate and the network state culty tech fascist stuff I write about has become very real in the past year—or in this year 2025—is through Project 2025. And many parts of the Seven Mountains mandate are recognized or made real in Project 2025. How did that happen? And where can we see Seven Mountains mandate type of thinking in Project 2025 and in the Trump government?

Matthew Boedy: I do say that Project 2025 is one of the Seven Mountains. It's certainly the Mountain of Government. As you know, the Project 2025 is this list of everything that can be done at a cabinet level agency in the second Trump administration, mainly sponsored or written by the Heritage Foundation, but Turning Point certainly was—its name is on that. So the Heritage Foundation has been doing this for a while.

And I also suggest the Heritage Foundation is a Seven Mountains movement, but it mainly focuses on just two mountains—the Mountain of Government and kind of the Mountain of Family, conservative social causes, maybe the Mountain of Education. But Turning Point's doing all seven mountains at once.

If you think about Project 2025, it aims at the federal government. So Turning Point's "Big Government Sucks"—they want to reduce the size of the federal government, not just its budget, but reducing cabinet level agencies, ending the Department of Education. These are all Turning Point goals, but also Project 2025 goals. And the reason they want to do that and the reason it is, say, a Seven Mountains goal is that you want to give power back to the states so they can enforce their idea of Christianity. It's much easier that way if you don't have that.

That said, Donald Trump is a wrench into that because that is a policy idea that really takes the power away from the federal government. But Donald Trump comes in and says, "Well, I alone can fix the government." So they had to pivot a little bit. I think Project 2025 is certainly could be done by any type of Republican and conservative president. But with Donald Trump, he breaks it much more quickly and wants to do it in a much more reckless fashion than another president might do it.

So he is certainly breaking down the government, but also suddenly he is the center of power, the influence. He takes all the oxygen up in the room. So the Seven Mountains mandate kind of pivoted with Lance Wallnau suggesting that Donald Trump is this new version of an Old Testament King. He is the guy that's going to restore our culture. So they have both the individual working and the policy working. And this is what makes, I think, the Seven Mountains mandate the indispensable concept behind the second Trump administration.

Gil Duran: One of the interesting things you do in your book is you argue that January 6th wasn't just a reflection of lies about the election, but also the decades-long influence of the Seven Mountains mandate. Tell us how the Seven Mountains theology created the conditions for this violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Matthew Boedy: Over the years, the Seven Mountains people made—and this is the NAR apostles and prophets—made predictions about what was going to happen. There's a couple of old predictions about Donald Trump becoming president. There's many predictions, of course, about winning the election in 2020, which they did not. The more predictions and prophecies that they made raised the stakes of that day because everything was centered on, of course, undoing or not allowing the vote to happen.

Ché Ahn, who I mentioned before, gave a speech on January 5th in Washington, D.C. about "God's going to win this election for us or change the vote tomorrow." So they very much bring spiritual power, bringing divine, not just mandate, but divine blessing to what it is they're doing. So you have Donald Trump saying, "Bring everybody to Washington, it's going to be crazy." You have everyone who is both a Christian nationalist and a patriotic person and Donald Trump MAGA people, and they're all energized by this religious fervor that we cannot stop until we've won.

And that theme really dates back to the beginning of the Seven Mountains mandate. Over the years, the different seven areas were tried and sometimes they had victories, but each time they lost, they raised the stakes, not just rhetorically, but also in terms of action—"we need to do something different the next time." So when you get to Charlie Kirk, he has raised the stakes so much. We're talking about good and evil. We're talking about half the country being demonic. The divide, the culture war being so pitched that on that day, they had to act in such a way as to go after the Capitol because there was nothing else that they could do.

I write about in the book a guy got arrested that day, a pastor, a youth pastor, who was in the Capitol that day. And he does a video, live video from the Capitol rotunda amidst the smoke. And he talks about why he's there. And then he talks about the gospel and spreading the gospel. Then he says, "That may not be enough. Sometimes we have to break down the doors." And he didn't mean that metaphorically. Obviously, he had gone into the Capitol. So you can see a type of religious fervor combined with Donald Trump's lies about the election, combined with years and decades of this kind of "we're not winning enough" really brought the insurrection to bear.

Gil Duran: We live in a time when American democracy is under attack, not by just one group, but by different groups that all have the same idea, which seems to be that democracy can't survive, mostly because they're in the minority and they can't impose their will or get their way in a democratic system. You know, this all ties into also white supremacy and the idea that, you know, minorities are going to become the majority in the 21st century. And so there's this sort of panic to find a way to rule society that doesn't necessarily involve everyone having a vote.

That, in the work that I do, seems to be a lot at the root of it. Also, if religion is on the decline in the United States, you get farther and farther away from people wanting to live in a Christian nation. So instead of trying to find a way to win in the democratic realm, it seems like a lot of energy is being concentrated right now on finding ways to exit democracy using captured influence, right? They may want to keep the country, keep dominion over the country.

And this is where the tech bros also merge because they don't want regulation. They don't want government. They don't want law. They view that actually as the religion of democracy—having all these rules put on wealthy people. So it does seem like we're under a concerted attack. It's not totally organized. You know, some people think it's all—there's a big plan and it's all mapped out. I think there are some divisions between these groups. There's some disorganization.

Also, I don't know what the dog would do if it caught the car because it's a lot to try to govern, you know, hundreds of millions of people. There's a lot at stake. The economy—if the United States was no longer a democracy, would it be successful or would it just fall down and become a banana republic like so many other countries? And the tech bros are actually okay with that because they want to escape into these zones where they'll be free from all of this and where they will no longer be governed by anyone except for themselves.

But it seems to me that with the story that I'm covering, which is getting a little more coverage now than it was last year when I thought people should have known about JD Vance and Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel and the crazy stuff that they say—and with what you cover—it doesn't seem like the coverage is commensurate to the threat and the importance of this issue. If these guys were Muslim or Black, I think the press would be paying very close attention and there'd be investigations, there'd be a lot more scrutiny on it, you know.

But instead it seems like there's a lack of interest from the mainstream media in really putting this on the front burner of what's going on in the country today. Why do you think that this hasn't been a front burner issue for politicians and for the media?

Matthew Boedy: I do think obviously coverage of religion needs some help. There are some good religion reporters out there, but you can count them on one hand. But I also think that this integration between religion and politics seems to be an old story to many national political reporters. "We've heard this story before. It's just the Moral Majority or the Christian Coalition again." But it's quite different this time around.

And also I think that especially with Charlie Kirk, many people see him, or especially at his death, as this free speech advocate, as this college student debater, and not a person who's organizing a Seven Mountains Mandate group. I think there's been several reports about him, but I think the ideas that he spreads are very much smoothed over or said in a way that you don't recognize them. You would have to be a religion scholar or pay attention as much as I have to see it.

But also I think that Turning Point does a good job of having its own media channels, its own bubbles. We're talking about Fox News—Turning Point has its own media arm. And I think we just live in a fragmented, segmented news cycle where Turning Point doesn't talk to major media organizations. So it's hard to do a story about them. Sadly, you know, Erika does now.

So I think there are many factors, but I will say that to my own hoard and professors, there's been some academics, certainly through the years, have noted this, written books about it. The books have not been read that much, but we've seen it for—

Gil Duran: That seems to be the case. What I found in covering tech extremism is that it's academics who are keeping an eye on it, but it's not making the translation to the media, even when you can see that it's exactly what they're doing. There's this reticence. I like to say that I identify as a journalist who reads. So that's a reason why I'm different from other people.

Matthew Boedy: Academics are also famously not good at translating things for journalists.

Gil Duran: That's another problem that we have. It's definitely the case. So, you know, we do need some deep thinking in this age of AI and social media. We need to be able to focus, understand a longer narrative, understand how things connect. And so thank you for writing the book. What's the response been to the book?

Matthew Boedy: Well, as you can imagine, since Charlie's death, I've been around the world on Zoom. And many people are interested in who he was, but they're also interested in this idea of the Seven Mountains and how Christian nationalism was the driver of Turning Point as an organization. I think in terms of reviews of the book, you know, many people have talked about it—that it put pieces together for them. Some people said they lived through this and didn't really recognize all of it at the same time.

I'm 47 and so I lived through a little bit of it. So I wanted to put the pieces together for people. And I think also that there's been several books about Christian nationalism and a lot of them have got some good play. But I think that most people did not understand the role that Turning Point played and they were, you know, really like, "Oh my God, this is really dangerous because of the power of that organization." I think it's gotten some good reviews.

Certainly media organizations around the world wanted to know who Charlie was when he died. And I think I wanted to get the truth out there as humanely as possible and talking about a person who was murdered, but also to talk about his vision which is being, you know, applied or practiced by his wife as we speak.

Gil Duran: Matthew Boedy, thank you for joining us on the NerdReich Podcast.

Matthew Boedy: Happy to be here.

Producer: And that's the first half of the pod. Now it's time for us to tell you how to support our guests. First up, Matthew Boedy. You've heard all about his groundbreaking book, The Seven Mountains Mandate. So go pick it up. It's essential reading. And let's plug our next guest, Kiera Butler. She writes for Mother Jones Magazine, and she and that magazine do great work every day reporting the things no one else is. Maybe subscribe.

And lastly, it's time for you to preorder Gil's book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley, Fascism and the War on Democracy. Look, pre-orders matter. So if you love the pod, you will love the book and it helps us out. Also, it makes a great gift for someone you love or someone you hate. We don't judge. Now back to the pod for part two with Mother Jones reporter, Kiera Butler.

Part Two: Kiera Butler on Highland Rim and the Theo Bros

Gil Duran: Kiera Butler, thanks for joining us on the Nerd Reich podcast.

Kiera Butler: Thanks so much for having me.

Gil Duran: You know, I have to say you're one of the few reporters in the United States who's really covering these extremist movements that are currently trying to pose a serious threat to American democracy. And in rereading your stuff over the past couple of days to prepare for this interview, it's just amazing the degree to which you understand both the tech bros and the so-called Theo Bros who are seeking to create a theocracy.

And in writing my book and doing my own research on this, I find that increasingly there's a convergence not only between the characters, but the ideas have a lot in common. And that's what we're going to get into in this interview. We also talked to Matthew Boedy, who wrote a book about the Seven Mountains mandate movement. And one thing that strikes me about the Seven Mountains mandate is that the core idea of taking over institutions of democracy to impose a new form of government also matches the ideology we see coming out of Silicon Valley these days—the idea of seizing the pillars of democracy.

Curtis Yarvin calls it "the cathedral," right? We have to replace the cathedral, you know, take over these institutions, replace them with parallel versions. The Theo Bros want a Christian theocracy. The tech bros want a sort of corporate dictatorship. You know, Balaji Srinivasan took Yarvin's idea for patchwork territories and turned it into a more venture capitalist, pitch deck friendly version called the Network State.

Listeners of the Nerd Reich podcast know a lot about the tech bros because that's what we talk about here. But who are the Theo Bros and why do people need to know about them?

Kiera Butler: So the Theo Bros are a group of mostly millennial, self-proclaimed Christian nationalist, extremely online men. And they're very specifically men. Many of them—I don't want to paint them as a monolith or anything—but many of them don't believe that women should be speaking in church or in the public sphere really at all. Many of them consider themselves reformed Christians. Another word for this is Calvinist. Some of them have an affiliation with a guy in Moscow, Idaho, who is sort of considered the patriarch of this movement named Doug Wilson.

He's built his own little fiefdom in Moscow, Idaho. He has a church, he has a school, he has a college, he has a printing press. You know, the parallels between what the Network State guys want to do and what Doug Wilson has done are many.

Gil Duran: Let's talk a bit about Doug Wilson there because he is one of the main players in the Theo Bro movement, if not the granddaddy of them. What are his connections to the Trump administration in Washington and what's he up to today that should make people concerned about the degree of influence he has? And what does Doug Wilson want?

Kiera Butler: Doug Wilson is a Christian nationalist. So I'll answer your last question first. And I think, you know, it would not be an exaggeration really to say that what he wants is a Christian America, an America where the Ten Commandments are the law of the land. And to answer your first question about his connections to the Trump administration and to Washington, there are a few.

I first started noticing those connections when he spoke last year at the National Conservatism Conference alongside JD Vance. Since then, there have been a bunch of other connections to the Trump administration that Doug Wilson has that have been reported on. I think an important one has to do with Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, who attends a church in the denomination called CREC that Doug Wilson founded. Doug Wilson earlier this year planted a new CREC church in Washington D.C. and Pete Hegseth has been in attendance there. CREC stands for the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.

Gil Duran: I believe it's Doug Wilson who's talked about kingdom building in Moscow, Idaho. And one thing that strikes me—a phrase that I'm seeing pop up a lot more, not only in the Christian nationalist movement, but in Silicon Valley where there's this budding sort of evangelical Christian movement trying to come into being—is this idea of bringing the kingdom of God down to earth in obedience to what they perceive as the message of the Bible. Can you tell us a little more about some of Wilson's specific ideas, how Christianity should function in the state?

Kiera Butler: It's not that he believes that Christianity, as it is broadly interpreted by many tens of millions of people in America, should be the official state religion or anything like that. It's his specific version of Christianity. And his specific version of Christianity is extremely culturally conservative. Doug Wilson is an interesting guy because he's very kind of deliberately provocative. He really enjoys making these like slickly produced videos about his beliefs.

And he loves to talk very openly about how he believes that there should be a patriarchy, that women should not be speaking publicly, women should not be in positions of power. Not only that gay people shouldn't be allowed to get married, but that gay people have no place in the church, in any church. He and some of his acolytes have talked about the need for prison reform, but by prison reform, they mean bringing back public flogging. He has very specific ideas about what Christianity should look like and what kind of Christianity should be the law of the land.

Gil Duran: In my reading on Christian nationalism, it seems like they largely have their own Jesus, a different version who's more of a warlord than a messenger of peace, who demands a war against the demonic forces, which are often cast in this ideology as liberals, progressives, as the secular state—and seems really far-filled from what most Christians believe.

And you've also written about Stephen Wolfe, the author of a book called The Case for Christian Nationalism, who's become sort of a tech bro leading theorist, a sort of a Curtis Yarvin or Balaji Srinivasan of these Christian nationalists. And he said something really interesting in a recent podcast interview. He said, "You don't need a majority. You need a strong minority that shapes the imagination of the rest." And this sounds a lot like what the venture capitalists of Silicon Valley are doing.

They like to call it hyperstition, the idea that you can just shape reality through storytelling, propaganda, and persuasion by creating culture where people follow certain admired people and those people have these ideas that they share and this way serve as vectors of radicalization for everyone else. And the other part of it that's very familiar is this idea of elite capture. You know, that there's a radical vanguard who can lead the way for everyone else.

And lately we've seen people like Chris Buskirk, who we'll talk about in a minute, talk directly about the need for an elite aristocratic ruling class in the United States, as if we don't already have one. But tell us a little bit about Stephen Wolfe and his vision and how he makes the strategy here explicit.

Kiera Butler: Yeah, so he's the author of this book, The Case for Christian Nationalism. He is a guy who describes himself as like a Wendell Berry type, like he's kind of a neo back to the land guy. But his views very much reflect what Doug Wilson wants to accomplish. You know, this Stephen Wolfe is a guy who believes very much in this idea of a Christian prince, you know, a Christian ruler who will be in charge. I haven't heard that podcast, but I'm not surprised to hear that he believes that this can be accomplished through very persuasive minority opinion rather than any kind of democracy.

Gil Duran: It's interesting because as I mentioned earlier, the kingdom of God—you mentioned the Christian Prince—I think there's also been talk of theocratic Caesarism. These are all the same things that Curtis Yarvin talks about—returning to monarchy, having a digital feudalism. You know, the Network State is about creating fiefdoms. So there's this amazing interplay between these two ideas. They really map onto each other. And I think it kind of explains why we're seeing this more explicit move in Silicon Valley to grasp onto Christianity as a religion.

We're seeing this little trend of these evangelical high-level VCs. You've got Peter Thiel trotting around the globe talking about the Antichrist. And it's interesting, the fusion here—do you think that's deliberate or do you think it's just a coincidence?

Kiera Butler: I want to talk a little bit about an event that I attended earlier this year where I really saw the, I don't know, convergence and synergy between these two seemingly disparate movements. It was the Pronatalism Conference. And this was a conference that was put on by this guy named Kevin Dolan, who got canceled a few years ago for some racist stuff that he said online. He deliberately brought together kind of people from the tech world and people from the very traditionalist Christian world.

And I think what everybody expected was lots of fights between these two groups about issues like embryo selection. You know, for example, like you couldn't have two more different approaches to this, right? Like you have the techno-optimists who are in favor of, you know, selecting embryos for traits like intelligence. And then you have, you know, traditional conservative Christians who believe that IVF is abortion. So of course, you know, there were going to be these big fights between these two groups, but that is not what happened.

There was lots of synergy between the two groups, people sort of sharing ideas. And the guy who put on the conference, Kevin Dolan, runs this group called Exit Group. Some of your listeners might be familiar with it. It is a group that wants to build a parallel society. And Kevin Dolan is a devout Mormon. And he has attracted within that group, Exit Group, both religious Christian fundamentalists and tech guys.

And part of the idea is for these groups to mix and mingle, not only to create business ventures, but also to find the kinds of people who in these new parallel societies might want to like get married and have babies and populate the new societies.

Gil Duran: It's interesting because obviously when you're talking about exit, Exit Group and putting together ways to create these parallel societies, that just echoes Balaji Srinivasan and the Network State. And in the Network State book, he has a whole section where he talks about what it will take to bring about the demise of the nation state and in the United States and bring about the Network State. And he identifies the Reds or the Republicans as the major allies of the grays who are the tech tribe that's emerging in politics. And their enemy, of course, is the Blues, the Democrats.

And he specifically identifies the followers of the so-called "red God"—basically the evangelical base of the Republican party—as an important ally who will be able to join with the gray tribe to push out the Blues. And it's amazing because here's this clinical description of a coalition strategy. Right? And at the same time, it's very dismissive to talk about Christianity as the "Red God." Right. That's what you call something if you don't believe in it at all.

And I mean, I don't think we're going to see Balaji claiming to be a Christian evangelist, but it does seem that they're using the same language. They have the same core ideas and the idea seems to be that democracy doesn't work. We can't have everybody weighing in. The country is headed toward a cliff. And they have to prepare something else. And there's almost an apocalyptic feeling that if they don't do this soon, it'll be the apocalypse, the Armageddon, the rise of the Antichrist, whatever.

We're seeing these narratives merge, especially with Peter Thiel. And one tidbit I found in reading through Balaji as well was he talks about how the Mormon religion was formed and took land in Utah. You know, there was these pioneer companies that recruited people to go across the country—thousands of them died, I believe—and to settle these preselected areas where they were going to build this new Zion, basically in the West. And it seems to me that largely what Balaji is trying to recreate—it's not something new, it's sort of echoing the past.

There was even something called like the Perpetual Migration Pioneer Fund. Like there was like a fund to pay for people to make this trip. So it's not clear to me whether the religious folks are getting this from the tech bros or whether the tech bros are actually just getting it from older religious folks. And of course the Network State in Balaji's words is compared to tech Zionism, right? Creating a new promised land for people.

So I don't know. It's interesting to me the way these map and merge. And I think your work is one of the few places where we see that the most clearly. Another place we see that the most clearly, which you have written about, is Highland Rim, which is a proposed zone on the Tennessee-Kentucky border that is basically a Network State for Christian nationalists. They're building churches. They're talking about crypto and digital self-governance. It totally merges the Theo Bro and Tech Bro philosophies. Tell us about Highland Rim, how you discovered it, and what people need to know about it.

Kiera Butler: The first thing that I think it's important to point out about Highland Rim is that it is a project that is spearheaded by a guy named Nate Fischer. Nate Fischer, he is in the tech world. He's also in the religious world. He's a Christian guy. He is an investor in a group called Pronomos Capital, which your listeners are probably familiar with. That's Patri Friedman's kind of startup societies venture fund.

So Nate Fischer, in addition to being an investor for Pronomos Capital, is also involved in an investment firm called New Founding. And he runs that with a guy named Josh Abbotoy. Those two guys are also involved with a publication called American Reformer, which is kind of the unofficial magazine of the Theo Bros. It's a publication where they kind of map out their intellectual underpinnings of this movement.

Part of New Founding is a real estate arm. It's a little bit complicated how these things are all related to each other, but basically New Founding is partnering with a group called Ridge Runner to create this Highland Rim Project. And the idea is that these are communities in these rural areas for what they consider to be heritage Americans, conservative Christians, who want to put down roots and be around like-minded people who share their conservative Christian values.

It doesn't look like demand is sky high for these places. It really is a very rural, very beautiful part of Appalachia. There's a guy who is, I don't know, appointed—like I think he's bought some land and he's kind of appointed himself like the head of this movement named Andrew Isker. He's a Theo Bro, he moved to this area from Minnesota because he was really upset about the progressive direction Minnesota politics were going in. He does a podcast and he has started a church there and he is trying to really just, you know, create a culture there.

I actually was able to speak with Josh Abbotoy for my story. And I asked him, you know, is this a Network State? And he said, "No, well, it's not exactly the same kind of thing that, you know, Balaji Srinivasan is talking about. He said, yes, we're interested in crypto, but it's not really a Network State." But right before I got on with you today, I was looking back at the Ridge Runner website. Now they're using the phrase "charter community." So it's interesting that they're kind of taking ownership of those ideas more than they used to.

Gil Duran: The charter city thing is something that some of these Network State types try to hide behind as Balaji Srinivasan's more insane comments have come to light, right? It's like, are you really buying into this gray tribe ideology? And so some people are running away from it. I know right now in Cloverdale in Sonoma County, there's a group trying to build something called Esmeralda. And at a recent city council meeting to discuss the project, Devon Zuegel, who is the head of the proposed Esmeralda Network State, claimed to have very little knowledge of the Network State movement, which is hilarious because she spoke at the conference.

She went to Prospera down in Honduras and wrote a 40-page paper about how wonderful it is. She was the editor-in-chief of Peter Thiel's Stanford Review for four years at Stanford, which is really kind of a feeder for people into his little worldview and sect. And in addition, I found this website that was deleted, a deleted website where she was annotating Balaji's blog posts about the Network State. I mean, I could go on and on. There's few people more immersed in the Network State ideology than Devon, but it was interesting that they feel this need to back away from it.

Because when people find out that it's this sort of cultish idea, and I consider the Network State to be a cult—and when you add on religion, you get a religious cult. I mean, Jim Jones had his own little territory called Jonestown, right? This idea is not new, a cult compound where you only live with people who share your religion or share your interest in yoga or share your interest in LSD—Charles Manson, Jesus. It's a cult. But people don't like that coming to their neighborhood. And how did people in the area where they're trying to build Highland Rim respond to the project?

Kiera Butler: Yeah, so actually there was the investigative journalist Phil Williams, who is a reporter at a local TV news affiliate. He did a story about this and he, you know, went in and asked people what they thought about this and people were horrified. Highland Rim, Ridge Runner guys are like, you know, "We're trying to build a culture here." And these folks were like, "But we already have a culture. We don't want our culture to be, you know, Christian nationalism."

So Phil Williams's reporting really pissed off the Ridge Runner and Highland Rim guys. If you look at Twitter, you can see them kind of having a tantrum about it, ongoing tantrum.

Gil Duran: That makes a lot of sense to me. You know, unbeknownst to most people, I spent a lot of time in Appalachia myself. I went to high school in Kentucky. I have a lot of family in Eastern Kentucky. I go there quite a lot. In fact, my family lives in a community where it's not unusual to see a Confederate flag flying from a post, you know, outside of a trailer. So I think the thing that is striking about people who already live in these conservative areas is they kind of want to be left the hell alone and don't necessarily want to be a part of a big club.

Part of living in the country is having privacy, having your own domain, having your own family, not necessarily being a part of some sect that wants to colonize an area that is already pretty well colonized. You know, whenever you have a group or cult or sect dynamic, you're going to have politics, you're going to have friction, you're going to have problems. And I think a lot of people choose to live in rural red states because they want to avoid that kind of thing.

So it's interesting to see them get rejected even in a place where they think they are going to be welcomed or maybe even praised as doing something that is appealing, but it's not really appealing. Just the same thing in Cloverdale, in Sonoma County, there's a growing movement of people who are very upset about that. And a lot of them are actually conservatives who don't like this idea of this group coming from outside to create some new thing in their community when they already have a community. So it's an interesting dynamic there.

You also—you mentioned American Reformer. So let's talk about that for a second, because I believe the original editor or the person who was listed as the editor of the American Reformer was Chris Buskirk, who I mentioned earlier. He's the guy who's been talking openly lately about the need for an aristocracy of some kind to rule the country. He was in a major publication recently talking about that. But Chris Buskirk was also the co-founder of something called the Rockbridge Network with a guy named JD Vance. And the Rockbridge Network is supposed to be like a venture capital firm to invest in politics.

And then New Founding, which was created by Nate Fischer and Abbotoy, is supposed to be a Christian venture capitalist firm. So we have all of this interplay between the Christians being venture capitalists, the venture capitalists cosplaying as Christians. And it's all this connected network of people and it all sort of connects up to JD Vance, who is perhaps the most prominent powerful agent of this movement, bridging both the tech bro world and the Theo Bros. What's going on with that?

Kiera Butler: Well, and indeed there is a photo that was unearthed by Jenny Cohn, who's a great researcher of this kind of world, of some of the New Founding guys, the Theo Bro guys, with JD Vance. And it's not entirely clear where the photo was taken, but it's JD Vance with a bunch of those guys who are connected with New Founding, American Reformer, Claremont Institute, Rockbridge Network. So it's this very kind of upper echelon dynamic that's going on there, which, you know, I wanted to, you know, use that idea also to go back to a point that you were making before about, you know, the fact that folks who are living in this area of Appalachia might not want these guys to come in and take over their community.

There's also a class dynamic going on here because, you know, these are the Rockbridge Network. I mean, Chris Buskirk, like, these people are like the richest of the rich, 1% people. And, you know, one thing that they're trying to do, this community on Appalachia is make this like hunting lodge event space. Like, it's not entirely clear, you know, who this is for. Like, is this for their rich friends to like come and have hunting trips? Like, and how do the folks—and you know, they talk a lot about on their, in their promotional videos about like, just the simple country folk who live here and have these, you know, salt of the earth traditions, but that's not who these guys are. So there's this very strange kind of class dynamic that's happening there as well.

Gil Duran: No one wants to be sort of fetishized by wealthy people who wish to sort of suck out the essence of your being and market it as a lifestyle. You know, the people who hunt, they already know where to go in the woods and hunt. They probably don't want you in their spot, you know. But it seems like what they try to do is create spaces where they can create a community and further bring people into their ideology more than anything.

But in a way they're trying to create something that is not needed in communities that already have this. And I would say that what these communities do need is really not these folks bringing their ideology to town, but maybe bringing some investments in local businesses or housing or solving some of the poverty and healthcare needs that plague rural areas. But instead it's like, no, let's bring our cult of people and put up a weird hunting lodge where we're going to preach at you our version of Christianity. And I just don't see that really working, which is why I think a good point that Balaji makes is he favors exit, getting out of the United States, getting out of democratic society.

These efforts to sort of take over are often rejected. We see it everywhere. In Solano County where they're trying to build California Forever, which they say is not a Network State, but it's all Network State'd out. Esmeralda, which is clearly being proposed by someone who's immersed in Network State, but claimed it's not the Network State—there's already this rejection of this idea from people wherever they go. And so it'll be interesting to see what happens.

I do think though, that these Christian nationalists are having an easier time infiltrating politics than they are infiltrating the communities where they're trying to build their cult compounds. The United States is under attack by multiple extremist movements with similar anti-democratic ideals. While we see some of that expressed through the Trump administration, I don't feel like there's enough coverage on the fact that there's an organized, moneyed forces behind some of this stuff.

You're one of the few reporters who does cover extremism. I think we should be reading about extremism every day in the major newspapers. It's an important beat right now because if this stuff works out, it'll be the story of the end of the American democracy. And that'll be an important story for people to have told. What do you think people need to know that's most important about the areas you cover? And what do you wish the mainstream media were doing differently?

Kiera Butler: I want to go back to something that you said earlier about the similarities between techno-optimism and religion. I went to a Bitcoin conference a few months back. My idea was to frame Bitcoin as a religion, but the similarities between this Bitcoin conference and the revivals, the prayer rallies, the charismatic Christian church services that I've been to were astounding.

If more people would cover techno-optimism in the same way that they cover religion, I think it would help people to see the ways in which techno-optimism has become religion-like, but also the reasons that we're seeing so much convergence between the world of tech, of Silicon Valley, and the world of Christian fundamentalism.

Gil Duran: Well, Peter Thiel has famously written that you should run your startup like a cult. And his Antichrist speeches make it clear that he understands that religion, apocalyptic religion, is an important technology for politics. It really motivates people. You have to create a belief that makes people join you and give their all. And so I think that's part of what we're seeing with this.

I do think that, you know, I call it the tech religion. Others call it TESCREAL—transhumanism, extropianism, singulatarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, longtermism. We've had an episode on that in the past. But if you look at what they're promising, right, it requires tremendous faith that if you're a believer, you will get to the promised land. You will get this big thing. You'll become a Bitcoin millionaire. Bitcoin Jesus will save you from the Antichrist fiat. It's increasingly promising eternal life. The idea that technology and AI will solve death.

You've got Brian Johnson out here tripping publicly on psychedelic mushrooms like a sorority girl at her first Burning Man trip and live streaming it. You've got heaven. We're going to go live in the stars. We're going to be multi-planetary, eternal heavenly beings. You've got the promised lands. You've got the Network States. We're going to go create tech Zionism. We're going to have our own promised land. We're the chosen ones, right? We're the good ones who are going to live and thrive after the apocalypse and everyone else is gone.

I could go on and on and actually I do in my forthcoming book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley, Fascism and the War on Democracy. But it's amazing the degree to which actually they're creating a religion. And I think that's something that you're onto and that a lot of other folks are still trying to cover tech as if it's a business story. It has gone beyond business, right? There is an emerging cult and it's a religious cult in many ways. Thank you so much for the work you do and thanks for joining us here on The NerdReich Podcast.

Kiera Butler: Thank you so much for having me.

Producer: The NerdReich podcast is produced and edited by me, R.R. Robbins. It's written and hosted by Gil Duran. How about you take a minute and pre-order Gil's book and sign up for the newsletter. You can do both of those things at thenerdreich.com. Today's final words from author Tom Robbins: "A sense of humor is superior to any religion so far devised." See you next time.

Are Silicon Valley billionaires tempting fate and flirting with the guillotine?

In a New York Times op-ed, Michael Hirschorn argues that tech oligarchs like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen are super-charging public anger at the wealthy. They’re doing this by flaunting their power and engaging in ever more absurd behavior that seems designed to stoke public hatred toward the rich overlords of American democracy.

The op-ed compares them to Louis XV, the French king whose flamboyant and reckless incompetence created the conditions for the French Revolution—a violent revolt against wealthy elites and the monarchy itself.

“The billionaires have only themselves to blame,” Hirschorn writes.

From the op-ed:

It’s as if the sheer scale of this wealth, which beggars even the riches of the Gilded Age, has induced a kind of class sociopathy. Peter Thiel, the crucial funder of JD Vance’s ascent, talks extensively about his desire to escape democracy (and politics generally) in favor of some kind of bizarre techno-libertarian future. Balaji Srinivasan, the investor and former crypto exec, calls for tech elites to take control of cities and states — or build their own — and run them as quasi-private entities.

Alex Karp, who along with Thiel founded the high-flying military intelligence company Palantir, shares his predictions about an apocalyptic clash of civilizations, pausing to brag, “I think I’m the highest-ranked tai chi practitioner in the business world.” In another era, this would all be laughable. But as the MAGA moment emboldens them to drop any pretense of civic virtue and just go full will-to-power, their nutty ideas are now borderline plausible. And terrifying.

Though the Network State cult is not mentioned by name, it’s a relief to see the NYT opinion section allow someone to mention Balaji Srinivasan and his plot to create private tech fascist governments. After the recent Financial Times story on the Network State, it will be harder for elite media outlets to completely ignore the issue. So, that’s progress.

In my talks over the past year, I have also mentioned the French Revolution as a frame for understanding one possibility of where things are headed. In 1789, the decadence, negligence and tyranny of the wealthy resulted a violent explosion that ended over 800 years of hereditary monarchy in France.

Hirschorn compares the conditions of pre-revolution France to what’s happening in the U.S. today:

The historian Robert Darnton described an uncannily similar moment in “The Revolutionary Temper: Paris 1748-1789,” his brilliant 2023 account of the decades leading up to the French Revolution. The preconditions were all there: suffocating top-down control of the media, rapid technological change, let-them-eat-cake behavior among the courtier class, weaponized religious bigotry, mansions with hideously de trop ballrooms. 

Billionaires hold outsized influence over our political system. American politicians tend to cater to wealthy donors instead of voters. But there are only 902 billionaires in the United States, which has a population of 340 million people.

As Hirschorn points out, polls shows that the American public has become increasingly resentful of the all-powerful role the ultra-rich play in our lives.

They may have the money and the proximity to power. But We, The People, far outnumber them. When we decide we’ve had enough, we can end this very quickly—hopefully with sensible tax rates and dramatic political reform instead of guillotines.

Click here for a gift link to read “The Billionaires Have Gone Full Louis XV.”

Big Tech’s ‘Elite Victim Complex’

Last week, Financial Times columnist (and Nerd Reich subscriber!) Edward Luce called out the dark visions of Silicon Valley oligarchs:

If America’s current generation of centibillionaires are any guide, storied wealth is a one-way ticket to hell. Humanity’s only hope of saving itself is to move to Mars, according to Elon Musk. The Anti-Christ is coming, says Peter Thiel. Crypto is your only security against a collapsing US dollar, says pretty much every bitcoin pusher in the neighbourhood.

Many of today’s dystopian plutocrats are the same people who promised utopia in the earlier phases of the internet. Something chemical must have changed since then in Palo Alto’s water supply. Instead of the lure of community and being connected, we are being sold cataclysm and apocalypse.

Click here for a free link to read his full post.

I recently joined Paris Marx on the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast. We discussed how Peter Thiel is putting a Christian mask on tech accelerationist ideas, why Silicon Valley is trying to claim the mantle of Christianity while violating everything for which Christ stood, and how tech billionaires are like an alien invasion that poses an existential threat to humankind.

Some highlights:

On tech’s search for God:

They seem to be trying to solve for what they call a god-shaped hole in their lives. But I'd argue that there's also a human-shaped hole in many of their lives.

On Elon Musk’s cutting of USAID:

The USAID cuts are Silicon Valley genocide. If 14 million people die, which is what the Lancet projects, that's more than double what Hitler killed in the Holocaust. And it's being done through policy, unnecessary policy, unwise policy.

On the need to ban and stigmatize crypto:

The crypto thing is a real problem, and I think a thing that needs to happen is we need to stigmatize crypto very strongly. It must become unacceptable for Democrats to accept crypto money. If a Democrat is accepting crypto money, they are buying into a dark, anti-American, anti-democratic vision of the future. And if you don't believe me, well then ask them: exactly what is crypto for, Senator? Exactly what is crypto for, Representative? Can you explain to me why anybody needs this? To hedge against the failure of the dollar? Well, isn't it your job to make sure the dollar doesn't fail?

On the real Antichrist:

If there is an Antichrist, the Antichrist is very clearly Silicon Valley in the 21st century. They are in every way against the words and the teachings of Christ.

Click below to listen to listen to our entire conversation (full transcript below):

Peter Thiel is the Real Antichrist w/ Gil Duran - Tech Won’t Save Us

Tech Won't Save Us

• Tech Won’t Save Us On Apple Podcasts

Transcript: Is Peter Thiel The Real Antichrist?

Transcripts are auto-generated and may contain errors.

Gil Duran [intro excerpt]: Thiel believes we're headed toward a massive scapegoating of some kind and he has a terror that Silicon Valley billionaires are going to be the scapegoats—probably because they're not actually the scapegoats, they actually are to blame for a lot of our problems today—and what he's trying to do is manipulate or manufacture a case for placing the blame elsewhere.

Paris Marx: Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host Paris Marx, and this week my guest is Gil Duran. Gil writes the Nerd Reich newsletter and is currently working on his first book which is called The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Global Democracy. I believe it will come out later this year. Gil is also a former opinion editor at the Sacramento Bee and editorial page editor for the San Francisco Examiner.

Now, as you probably heard, Peter Thiel likes to talk about the Antichrist, and he gave a series of lectures earlier this year—in September, I believe—where he discussed his ideas for the Antichrist, what it is, the significance that it has for us today, and of course how it fits into his broader fascist political project and how he is trying to use this concept to basically advance his political aims, to protect his power, to increase his power and that of his other Silicon Valley billionaire friends.

I wanted to talk about this at the time, but I figured it might be best to wait to see how things percolate after he gave those lectures, so that we can discuss the bigger picture and actually understand what he's trying to do here, how this fits into the broader Silicon Valley project. And Gil is great at giving that insight because he has been looking into the ideologies of these Silicon Valley billionaires for quite some time.

So through this conversation, we don't just discuss the lectures that Peter Thiel gave, but we connect it to ideas from people like Marc Andreessen or Balaji Srinivasan and this broader ideology that we hear these Silicon Valley billionaires spouting as they try to defend their interests, as they try to advance their political project.

And that means not just working with the Republican Party and Donald Trump, but as Gil talks about in this episode, trying to buy influence with the Democratic Party as well. And Gil has a lot of critical things to say about how the Democratic Party has been too close to Silicon Valley, to Silicon Valley billionaires, and right now isn't offering an inspiring, hopeful message that can actually bring people in, that could try to bridge political divides and build a broader constituency by going after not just Donald Trump but these tech billionaires as well and the things that they are doing not just to the United States but so many different parts of the world.

So ultimately I think this was a fascinating conversation. There's some great insight in here about the worldviews of these tech billionaires that of course we talk about on the show a lot, but that this discussion about the Antichrist and the religion behind these things really helps to add another dimension to through this conversation.

So with that said, if you enjoy this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. You can share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it.

And if you do want to support the work that goes into making Tech Won't Save Us every single week, so we can keep having these critical, in-depth conversations looking into the ways that Silicon Valley and the billionaires that command it, that power it, are shaping our world in so many different ways and so many harmful ways—all while getting ad-free episodes and even stickers if you support at a certain level—you can join supporters like Jess from Perth, Kenny from Victoria in British Columbia, Sam from Copenhagen, and Andrew from Boston by going to patreon.com/techwontSaveUs where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation.

Paris Marx: Gil, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us.

Gil Duran: Thanks for having me.

Paris Marx: Absolutely. Really happy to talk to you in the past to learn about your insights on Silicon Valley and what all these billionaires are up to. But as I think many listeners of the show will know, Peter Thiel has recently done this series of lectures on the Antichrist. I guess it's a couple months ago now, but I kind of wanted to sit and see how these lectures hit the public and what the discussion was going to be, and so I'm happy you can join me now so we can dig into it.

And maybe I would start by just asking: were you surprised to see Peter Thiel give a series of four lectures on the Antichrist when this was announced and when it became clear that he was doing this? Or is this kind of something that he has been discussing for a while at this point?

Gil Duran: It is something he'd been discussing for a while. I was surprised to see him do it in San Francisco. He must have known there would be a reaction, that it would get more attention and negative attention than his previous talks. This is something he's been talking about for a few years—it's an obsession of his—but he seems to be now refining it and trying to come to some kind of final point.

And when I saw that he was going to do it, my worry was that nobody would pay attention. So I started a bit of a drama campaign to hype it, to make sure people understood how weird this was. And the media did end up covering it quite a lot. It was not unusual for him to speak about the Antichrist in terms of that's something he often does, but he seems to be escalating what is this very kinky pseudo-intellectual obsession. And I don't think it went very well for him this time around.

Paris Marx: Gotcha. Yeah, he's certainly a guy who likes to think of himself as like this real intellectual of Silicon Valley, right? That he understands these concepts so much deeper, that he has done this kind of extensive reading, that he sees himself as kind of a tech philosopher in a sense, right? It's really how it comes across.

Gil Duran: He fancies himself that way, and others flatter him as that. But I find his intellect to be very hollow. He only focuses on a few things that are his obsessions, and those things aren't really worthy of such intense focus for somebody who's not really religious.

If you look at—I interviewed an Antichrist historian about this stuff and it was just laughable. He's acting like a snake handler in Kentucky. That's the level of his discourse. I grew up in the Catholic religion. I grew up in a very apocalyptic, doomsday framework, and I remember being a kid worried about this stuff. And you get older and you're like, "Okay, well there's more to the Bible than just the doom talk."

Not only that, but the Antichrist only appears in a couple of places, and he's conflating it with the Beast of Revelation, which some religious people do, but there's no evidence that those two things are the same. And Antichrist is not necessarily some figure—it could be anybody who's against Christ, all of the people who are against Christ. And in any case, it's a very strange subject for a billionaire who most fits the description of Antichrist to be lecturing everybody else on it. And it's really curious as to why he is so insistent on making everybody think about this particular subject.

Paris Marx: Truly. And I want to dig into that further. So in your view, why is he so obsessed with this concept of the Antichrist? Why is this something that he has fixated on for so long?

Gil Duran: Thiel is obsessed with the idea of scapegoating. His obsession comes from René Girard, who was a professor he was fascinated with at Stanford who wrote that humans have a tendency in societies to find scapegoats for their problems and to punish those scapegoats in order to try to alleviate the anxiety and tension in society.

Thiel believes we're headed toward a massive scapegoating of some kind, and he has a terror that Silicon Valley billionaires are going to be the scapegoats—probably because they're not actually the scapegoats, they actually are to blame for a lot of our problems today—and what he's trying to do is manipulate or manufacture a case for placing the blame elsewhere: on Greta Thunberg, on government, on regulation, on anything but Silicon Valley.

It's a weird form of projection and effort to escape the blame while also making it entirely clear who should be blamed. And it's strange because I can't think of a worse spokesperson for Christianity than Peter Thiel, right? On so many levels he would be rejected by actual doomsday Christians, mostly because he's a gay man—which I don't have a problem with—but a lot of the people whose language he's trying to speak do have a problem with that.

I mean, I grew up hearing people say that gay people are going to go to hell. I'm sure Peter Thiel grew up hearing that too, and obviously he internalized this in some kind of bizarre, traumatic way. And he's now spouting this, but I think at the heart of it is an understanding that we are coming to a breaking point soon, and the most likely target of our collective anger is going to be the people who have stolen everything from us and are now trying to steal even the future.

Paris Marx: Yeah, I think you put that really well. And as I listen to you describe it, it really brings to mind—as I guess someone who's writing, I'm more familiar with stuff that Marc Andreessen has been writing the past few years as well, going back to his Techno-Optimist Manifesto that seemed very much not just based around holding up and arguing for the tech industry and the tech billionaires and what they're doing, but again trying to identify those enemies and those people for the supporters of this vision of technology that someone like Marc Andreessen would want to see, to kind of go after, right? The elites and the communists and all this kind of stuff that he was calling out there and saying that tech ethics was like a great enemy. This seems very much aligned with some of the things that Thiel is kind of pointing out as a potential form of the Antichrist, I guess, based on reading some of what you've written.

Gil Duran: Yeah. It's “good to be bad and it's bad to be good” seems to be their motto, which sounds a lot like something the Antichrist would say.

The Techno-Optimism Manifesto from Andreessen—which quotes fascist philosophers, by the way—Thiel's Antichrist lectures quote fascist philosophy. He's obsessed with Carl Schmitt as well as René Girard. Carl Schmitt was this Nazi jurist and philosopher whose main idea was that politics is an existential battle between friend and enemy, often using religious symbols in a political fashion towards some state of emergency where the rules are suspended and power is seized by a leader. And that's very much at the heart of his Antichrist lecture.

They're very concerned with who has power in the future, who owns the future, as Jaron Lanier put it. They're obsessed with that. And so they're trying out different flavors of this. There's the Antichrist brand, there's the Techno-Optimist brand, there's the Elon ketamine space travel brand, there's the Bryan Johnson live-forever brand. Silicon Valley is in the middle of a psychotic break, an existential crisis, and they are looking for God and they are looking for eternity and they're looking for trillions of dollars, and they are trying to drag the rest of us along into this with them.

Because Silicon Valley does have a lot of power to influence what's happening in politics, in media, and in the world. And that's why I decided to write so much about the Antichrist and Peter Thiel. People were like, "Why do you keep writing about this?" Well, I'm trying to expose what they're doing, because I think there's power in exposing propaganda techniques. This is memetic warfare, that's what they call it. This is hyperstition—they're attempting to manifest a reality. And I want to show people: this is what they're doing.

Like when you see a magic trick video on TikTok and then someone shows you how the trick worked—before you couldn't see it and now you can see that there's a cup in the cup or whatever—that's what I'm trying to do, is do the TikTok video where we bust the magicians. And that's not hard to do if you look at what they're doing and if you put that in the context of what they're after and who they're quoting: fascists.

Who mixes fascism and Jesus? The Nazis did.

Paris Marx: I just saw an interview the other day with Alex Karp—of course, the CEO of Palantir—where again he was saying, "Oh, he's not a Nazi, but he talks to Nazis all the time" and doesn't understand why they get such a bad rap or something. And it's just wild to see them so kind of explicitly making these allusions and connections to Nazis when their politics seem so clearly aligned with a fascist project. It just blows my mind how open they seem to be able to be about it.

Gil Duran: Yeah, to me they're making a big mistake of overexposing themselves, which is good. I think the more they talk, the more they show their craziness, the less people will feel any sympathy or compatibility with their worldview.

A good case in point is Curtis Yarvin, who started giving all these interviews after being this mysterious dark elf or whatever, and he's a completely long-winded, boring, charmless dork who laughs at his own jokes through most of his talking and filibusters constantly. And he went all the way to getting a New Yorker profile—that was pretty much the end of Curtis Yarvin's aura. He was completely exposed as an out-of-control, weeping bore.

And I told Curtis Yarvin this—we were corresponding, I was trying to get him to do an interview with me. We were bantering and I was trying to get him to keep talking, and he did, in email anyway. Before I came back to journalism, I did PR for many years for politicians. I was like, "You're breaking a cardinal rule here. You're way overexposed. You're just yammering on, taking any debate. You've sort of become a circus act for any kind of mid-tier, low-tier intellectual who needs a little juice on social media: go debate Curtis Yarvin."

He wanted to debate me, actually. I was like, "That would reduce my value to be seen on stage with you, so no. Go debate someone at Harvard."

But they're all doing this, and the more they talk—Karp, I didn't really know what his deal was, and seeing him walk around talking about his Nazi friends in his stupid vest—this just ruins their image and shows you how weak they are, how thin their thinking is, and how imminently defeatable they will be once people wake up to what these people have in mind.

They are way vulnerable to actual pushback, which is why it's sad that the Democratic Party has no spine and no brain, because we should be hitting these people hard already.

Paris Marx: I want to come back to that point just a little bit later after we dig into this stuff a bit more. I've talked to a number of people on this show about this in the past, about kind of how we see more and more—I feel like—these tech billionaires and people in the tech industry embracing religion and embracing faith in a way that I feel like we haven't seen for a long time. And it seems to be ascendant in a way that seems a bit surprising, especially when, as you've been discussing, we see the ways that they're trying to use religion, use these concepts of the Antichrist.

How do you see these tech billionaires kind of justifying or explaining their religious belief, and how do you see them using that toward their own ends, I guess?

Gil Duran: They seem to be trying to solve for what they call a god-shaped hole in their lives. But I'd argue that there's also a human-shaped hole in many of their lives. And this could be a little unfair, but I largely see their public professions of newfound Christianity as entirely fabricated, as sort of an op.

They understand—and if you listen to them and you read what they have been talking about for years—they understand the power of religion, the power of religious narratives to motivate movements, to motivate action. Why would anybody follow you or believe you should be in control of the world unless they believe you are a divine or moral authority? So if you're into authoritarianism, you need this idea of the divine order. You need this idea of a belief that goes beyond the earthly plane. And so I think that's a part of it—they are glomming on to this because it's the most accessible narrative.

But if you look at the Silicon Valley version of Christianity, who does it center? It centers Silicon Valley millionaires and billionaires. Peter Thiel actually said during his Antichrist lecture that the people in that room—because it was this new tech Christian organization called ACTS 17, Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society, started by the Anduril guy's wife, Trae Stephens's wife, who says, "I'm an arms dealer and a Christian"—this is his message. And he said the people in this room gathering to hear him speak are doing more important work than any Christians anywhere else in the world.

And that seems to be their mentality: Christianity is another way for them to be special and to be important and to be more important than everyone else. And again, having grown up in Christianity and having a deep appreciation for the words of Jesus Christ—if there is an Antichrist, and I'm not saying there is because again I'm not religious and I don't think it's a particularly helpful framework—if there is an Antichrist, the Antichrist is very clearly Silicon Valley in the 21st century. They are in every way against the words and the teachings of Christ.

Elon Musk's cuts to US aid at DOGE, based on the ideas of Curtis Yarvin, who was funded and supported solely by Peter Thiel, has already killed—those DOGE cuts have already killed 600,000 people and are projected to kill 14 million people by 2030, and many of those will be children. So what would Jesus do about US aid?

These people are not Christian in my book. They are manipulating religious symbols in an effort to gain power. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that they are trying to merge with the MAGA movement, which has a base of religious extremists who are its most powerful component. And so in a way what they're trying to do is be like, "Hello, fellow Christians." But I don't think people are really buying it. When you hear them talk about religion, they are way too flowery and animated and self-righteous. It seems like a bit.

Again, I wouldn't pretend to be a pious Christian. I haven't been to mass in a long time. I don't really claim to be the religion of my birth. But I think there's a guy in the Bible who says you're not supposed to pray out in public like the hypocrites do, that you're supposed to do it quietly, and that the real meaning of it all is to be as Christ was, and that even a godless person who helps the poor is more Christian than the holiest man in the temple who—who was it who said all that? I forget. Maybe someone in Silicon Valley can remind me.

Paris Marx: And even when I hear you say that, and I want to pick up on what you were saying about how they're trying to get in with this MAGA movement, but like, the idea that you would kill one person and that should be—you should be sent to prison and you should be held to account for doing something like that—like obviously this is deemed to be one of the worst possible crimes that you can commit in our society, right? But you can make a decision as someone like Elon Musk does to pull this funding for aid, for food to starving people, for medications for people who need those medications to be able to survive, to live a good life. And as you're saying, you can not just kill but severely impact millions of people around the world and just move on, live your life. No one's really going to try to hold you to account for having done that.

It's hard to wrap your head around, really, when you think about it. When you talk about Elon Musk and the US aid cuts and the kind of devastating human toll that that has, it's hard to see how someone like him can just go on living in the world and continue to have so much power, to continue to control these companies, potentially become a trillionaire now as we're seeing. I don't know, it's hard for me to really grapple with that.

Gil Duran: Well, the USAID cuts are Silicon Valley genocide. If 14 million people die, which is what the Lancet projects, that's more than double what Hitler killed in the Holocaust. And it's being done through policy, unnecessary policy, unwise policy. US aid isn't just about helping poor people. It's about American power around the world. It's how we gain and curry favor. It's how we make people think we're good and show that we care about more than just invading and extracting.

And there's a lot of critiques of US aid and the way it's been used to further US interests, but if you're running the federal government, you're supposed to be furthering US interests. So in two ways, this is a very bad, suspicious policy. I would be in favor of feeding and helping people survive anyway. And by the way, these are people who are so worried about the decline in the human population, allegedly, and feel like we don't have enough people—then why are you killing 14 million of them?

And that gets to the heart of the matter, which is that these are not white people. The people they want on earth are white people. So I think there's going to have to be accountability at some point for all of this, and we can't take anything they say at face value, whether it's claiming to be Christian or claiming to worry about the world population, because everything they do is the opposite of what they say they want to do. And it really exposes the rotten heart of what's going on in Silicon Valley.

It has gone so much farther than it should have. Literally, this policy will kill 600,000 people, and the reward for that is becoming a trillionaire.

Paris Marx: Yeah, it's disgusting. It truly is. It turns your stomach just to think about it.

You mentioned before we got onto this subject how these people are kind of using Christianity, it seems, rather than really deeply believing in what it says, what you would imagine actually comes along with believing in a faith like this. And of course we can clearly see even the pope himself, if you're a Catholic or if you follow that, increasingly calling out the tech industry and what these people are doing, the effects of their worldviews and their actions.

But one of the things that you mentioned there was obviously you have this MAGA movement, this National Conservative movement that has aligned itself with Donald Trump, and that it feels like a number of these tech billionaires who have also embraced Donald Trump are trying to get in with. But that relationship seems to have some clear tensions between these National Conservatives and these supposedly Christian Silicon Valley folks. What do you see in the tensions between these two groups, and what's your read on what's going on there?

Gil Duran: I think for all their flaws, and for all the ways in which I disagree with the religious conservatives, I think they are smart enough to understand that these tech billionaires are not like the rest of us, and what they want is not what any of us want.

I have a very different conception of the future than my MAGA ex-brother-in-law, but if I were to tell him, "We should destroy the United States," he would be very upset by that. And by the way, so would I. And I know all the flaws of this country, all the terrible things it's done—it's still my country, and you're taught to love your country and that you want to make your country better. Somehow we have different definitions of what that is.

These guys don't believe in this country. These tech billionaires, they want a post-America future, a post-democracy future. They think the Founding Fathers were cucks. They think the Constitution is toilet paper. It's analog. They're going to go into their blockchain smart contract future, and all of this is dumb. And part of it is that they don't want to live in a world where they don't get to found the country. Why should these old dead guys in wigs get to be the ones who are the founders? We are the founders. That's the special magic word in Silicon Valley, is to be the founder.

And if you read Balaji, he says all of this just as much. It's all there in a convoluted form.

So I do think there are some tensions. The right wing, the MAGAs, are also very suspicious of AI, which is talking people into suicide and doing all kinds of terrible things and threatening to replace everyone's jobs, which will cause massive upheaval—which, by the way, is the whole point. That's the point of it: to cause this massive upheaval and to take all the jobs and all the value and give it up to the handful of billionaires and trillionaires, which will then deprive the economy of any kind of money and lead to some kind of great collapse.

I mean, in many ways, I think these guys are trying to be fascists, but I think they're the most avowed Marxists out there, because they're trying to prove Marx right in every way. And I'm not a Marxist—I'm just like, but they're starting to convince me. Let's just put it that way. Like, hey, he said this and you guys are doing it. But they're hyperstitioning Marxist reality.

The other thing I've noticed in dealing with the Network State issue, where they're trying to build these cities here in California—these tech cities—is that some of the loudest critics are MAGA Republicans. And part of that is because they think these are liberal billionaires and that these are 15-minute cities and have something to do with climate change. And I don't want to disabuse anybody of their rationale for opposing Silicon Valley, as a recovering propagandist myself, if you're motivated by your own narrative there...but I've had some talks with these people, and I've said, "Well, you know, I come from a Democratic background. We probably disagree on a lot. But just so you know, these people are not Democrats, and they're not Republicans. They're their own thing. They're closer to you than they are to me, but they'll use anything they can. They'll use Ro Khanna and Elissa Slotkin and Gavin Newsom, and they'll use Ted Cruz and Donald Trump and JD Vance. Any way they can win, they'll do it."

And what we have to realize—this is the metaphor I've been testing out—is that this is not about red versus blue right now. We'll get to that later. We'll never be done with that one. This is about an alien invasion by a species of strange human being that doesn't even want to be human anymore, that doesn't even want to live on Earth anymore, and that doesn't believe in God—that thinks it's God. And this is an existential threat to our country, to our future, to the planet, and we have to fight against that.

And they don't quite agree with me, but they're thinking about it. They understand what I'm saying. They would normally despise me as a Democratic spokesman, someone who worked for Kamala Harris and Jerry Brown. But they see what I'm writing, and that we're against a common enemy. And so to go back to René Girard and Peter Thiel, we are in a crisis in our society. We do need to solve it, and we do need to unite people in some way. The way we unite those people may be unorthodox. It may not make sense right now. But I think the key is to unite the majority of people in the country and in the world against this alien species of billionaires. They are the enemy.

Paris Marx: That's really fascinating to hear. And it brings to mind, in a sense, thinking about the commonalities and finding that kind of common enemy or common program that brings people together even if they have very different politics. And it brings to mind to a certain degree some of the things that Bernie Sanders used to do in the way that there would be people who would be conservatives, but the type of way that he was talking about politics, he would get them to consider these more liberal or progressive ideas because he was speaking to them and he was speaking about the issues that they felt mattered. And talking about how the tech industry and these Silicon Valley billionaires are a common enemy to so many people and to our way of life and to our ability to kind of live in this world is something that I think increasingly brings a lot of people together, as you're saying.

I'm happy that you started to redirect our conversation back to Peter Thiel, because that's where I wanted to take it as well. And I wanted to ask you: when Peter Thiel talks about the Antichrist, how does he position the Antichrist? What is the Antichrist in his view? Who is he trying to say is the Antichrist? And then based on something that you were saying earlier, as he's describing that, what does it sound like the Antichrist really is if this is how we're supposed to understand this concept?

Gil Duran: Well, I'll start with the end of that. The Antichrist, I think, is whoever wins total world power. And he has this fantasy that somehow that's what the left wants or what the left is doing, what the liberals are doing, and that therefore justifies what he's trying to do and what the right's trying to do. It's politics as an existential crisis—one side has to win over the other.

And the reason the Antichrist framework is so powerful is because it completely dehumanizes your opponent. They're no longer a person with a different opinion. They are evil incarnate, the servants of Satan, against all life, against God, against Christ, against all of it. And therefore nothing you do to them is out of bounds. They do not deserve mercy. They do not deserve law. They do not deserve democracy. That's why it's such a dangerous trope to use.

And he tries to put the label on Greta Thunberg for being a climate activist—the idea that all of us getting together to save our planet and stop burning fossil fuels is somehow going to lead to a totalitarian government. He says that communism was the Antichrist of the 20th century—communism, which I didn't know there were multiple Antichrists in multiple centuries, but again, it's not one person. So for him it's either one person or it's a movement. It just shifts to be whoever his enemy is.

Taxes, regulations is another possible Antichrist. But he also defines—and this is the most interesting part of all—he defines the Antichrist as someone who would rise to power by talking constantly about apocalypse and Armageddon, and as someone who would be highly interested in surveillance and total control. And the person who most fits the bill in the entire world right now is Peter Thiel, who is a co-founder of Palantir, which is wrapping its tentacles around every government in the world that it can get a hold of. And Peter Thiel is traveling the world talking about the Antichrist, the apocalypse, and Armageddon non-stop.

Not only that, but he's created this wave in Silicon Valley, which I call Silicon Valley apocalypse capitalism, where they're all starting to talk this way. Silicon Valley is obsessed with apocalypse and the end times.

So the thing about the Antichrist narrative—and this came from the historian Robert Fuller, who wrote a book called Naming the Antichrist back in the '90s—is that the people who accuse others of being the Antichrist very often, it can be reversed. They meet all the characteristics they're laying out. So in a way, the Antichrist is a mirror. It's a mirror image. And that's why I say it's really about who is on the outside when the majority unites.

And what Peter Thiel is saying is: we have to find a way to engineer so that our enemies—the climate activists, the liberals, the left—are the scapegoat, because otherwise it's going to be us. And that's because he knows that's the most logical conclusion, is that they are the ones to blame.

And it doesn't have to be that way, by the way. I don't believe we have to have an apocalypse. I believe we could save the planet. I believe we could solve our problems democratically. I believe that people could have their needs met on a planet where trillionaires are possible, being part of a species that can envision going to Mars and beyond. We can solve the problems on this earth and start by helping the poor, helping the sick—which, by the way, is what Jesus fucking said we should do. And they claim to be on the side of Jesus, but they don't want to do that. They want to kick off. They're against the creation itself.

So the Antichrist thing is a mirror. And I really think that Thiel—Peter, if you're listening—really need to de-escalate from that. Because, you know, 20 years ago I read a book called The Pursuit of the Millennium by a Cambridge scholar named Norman Cohn. It's all about the history of this eschatological apocalypse thinking through European history. European history is full of movements that were into the world movements and ended up in violent revolutions and pilgrimages and all kinds of things like that. And some revolutions were worthwhile, but a lot of them were weird and bad.

This never ends well. The apocalypse mentality is headed toward violence always, in every case. And Norman Cohn saw the rise of the Nazis as the most recent example and manifestation of that. He wrote his book in the early '60s. So this is some dangerous stuff to play with. It's a dangerous thing to hyperstition.

And I think we need to use hyperstition—this power of imagining the future—to imagine a future where we don't have a bunch of billionaires threatening us with apocalypse and where we don't have any billionaires at all who have this power to completely take over our country and reshape our lives. What Silicon Valley is trying to do is basically acquire and liquidate our country, and that should not be possible. We have a hole in the Constitution that has somehow allowed this to happen.

And, you know, I was always against people saying, "Well, we need to amend Citizens United." I'm like, "How the hell are we going to do that? Washington's all locked up." We need to think beyond what exists today. We need to think what the future looks like when people realize who the enemy really is and what they've tried to do to our country. And so I'm becoming a lot more optimistic these days. I'm a techno-optimist too, just in a very different way.

Paris Marx: I wanted to pick up on a few things that you said earlier and then maybe pick up on some of the later parts of what you were saying after that. But when you're talking about identifying the enemy, as we talked about earlier, obviously I see a lot of that in Marc Andreessen. They need to find the enemy to basically direct the anger of a lot of the public in a different direction from themselves, as you're saying. And you can also understand then why they're so determined to attack democracy, as you have been talking about, because they don't want us to be able to use the levers of power against them. They want to take away the ability for us to really start to rein them in and to ensure that they don't have the power that they do.

But when you're talking about really taking aim at the people who say Peter Thiel would identify as the Antichrist, that also speaks to me—you brought up Balaji Srinivasan earlier—some of the stuff that he has talked about about identifying the reds and the blues in these different cities of the future or whatever, and really trying to basically make them non-humans. You can do anything to them. You can exclude them. You can kick them out. You need to identify them in the way that you can think in the past of how the Nazis were identifying the Jews, making them wear clear markers, these sorts of things coming up again and again.

And it's a really dangerous vision for what a future could be and how they really do just try to find their enemies and say, "We are going to identify these people clearly. These people are not human. These people can be attacked. It doesn't matter what you do to them. But join our side and we can kind of take these people on together," sort of a thing.

Gil Duran: Yeah, they know that much of history, but I think there's a lot they're missing. They don't realize how unappealing they are. Having worked in politics, it's an unfair world, but you got to have charisma to lead people. You got to have something that animates them, that makes them want to believe in you. All they have is money. And that's why they get all of these insufferable dorks and like five girls to show up and clap and go to their conference or whatever. Those people are just trying to get their stupid startups funded.

You know, having been in political power before, there's all these people who show up when you're in a suit and you're important. And the minute you don't have it anymore, you have three friends. You find out who your friends were. That's how it is with these guys too. They don't realize that they're actually not popular. They're just rich. It's the pork chop around your neck, bro. It's not anything you're saying, anything you're doing.

And the thing is that the people in Silicon Valley, these young people, they're not very smart—maybe about computers or coding or something—but not about humanities, not about politics certainly. And that's something to me that's been interesting as someone who's an expert on politics, who's done city hall, who's done campaigns, the Capitol, the Statehouse. They're so damn green. Like, I could have looked at California Forever early on—I did early on—like, that shit ain't passing a vote in Solano County. Everybody knew that. It's not like I had a magical power. Anybody who knows politics knows that's not going to happen. You're picking a huge fight. Nobody knows who you are. Your spokesman's from the Czech Republic—that's your CEO. You at least got to get a local to pretend this was their homespun dream, man. You don't know how to tell a story in politics. Come on.

So there's some things they don't understand. They don't get it. I don't want to say what all those things are because I don't want them to get smart about it. They have started to hire Democratic operatives here in California, and they're hiring up all of them. Most of the people working for venture capitalists right now in their political ventures in California are the advisors to Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris. People don't really talk about that because we have a political press that largely protects these people so that they give them little scoops now and then. And there's like a "don't bite"—wolf does not bite wolf—game being played. But I'm working on that. My book will have some information in it.

Because my fear is that what these guys are going to do is buy off the Democratic Party as well, and that just means they're on a slower boat to the tech fascist future. If you think about it, they could give $10 million to everybody in Congress and make it all back in a crypto scam next week. How much of Congress could they buy with that? Probably a lot.

So I think we have to act before they get that kind of brazen power. And with Trump getting rid of all shame in politics, like in 10 years people might be like, "Yeah, I'm becoming a congressman so I can just get rich and do what tech wants me to do." And that's what Balaji says in his weird screeds. Like, we'll pay the police, we'll ally with the police and give them free food and give jobs to their family members. He identifies bribery and—he calls it "merging the networks." We got to merge the networks.

So to me, that's the bigger danger, and I think it needs to be called out. I think a lot of these folks—some of these consultants I came up with them in politics, I've known them for years—they just want the big check. They don't really think about what they're getting into. Some of them have started to realize it because of my work. Some of them text me links sometimes. Like, "Did you see this thing?" And I'm like, "Wait, oh, so you're paying attention now? Are you still on the payroll?"

But again, the venture capitalists—even the people who work on their political campaigns are just doing it for money. That's a problem they have to confront. Again, in their fantasy of the future where they rule everything, they're not factoring in the fact that their guards are going to murder them the first chance they get. Because historically, violence is what makes you king. Why would you sit around guarding some trillionaire in his digital castle when you can just put a hole in his head and be the king?

So they will come to appreciate the charms of liberal democracy too late, I fear. And again, one thing they don't factor in is that the reason we have the system of government we have through all of Greece and Rome and all of history is because we tried everything else. Nothing has been tried more than tyranny and authoritarianism.

While they were getting all hyped up on fascist philosophy during the pandemic, I strangely fell into a rabbit hole of the French Revolution and read a lot of books about that. Fascinating stuff. And they should do that as well. I would say get off the fascism for a minute. I'll read the fascism, you read the French Revolution, and let's catch up in 2028.

Paris Marx: You and Peter Thiel can have a discussion then once you've caught up on some different literature.

Gil Duran: Anytime, Peter.

Paris Marx: But when you're talking about the political campaigns and the political spending, I feel like the crypto industry has really showed how effective you can be at deploying that money in order to try to, in their case, kind of buy policies that are favorable to them. But it feels like they have kind of set an example for then other folks in the tech industry to want to follow if they want to try to pursue similar ends in kind of future campaigns, which is kind of concerning.

Gil Duran: Well, there's some tension growing. I just saw a story today that they also have an AI PAC now, and apparently MAGA is upset about that. They're trying to claim too much power too quickly. That's another rookie mistake they're making.

If you read The Art of War, change should not be rapid and massive. It should be slow change, but never too much at once, or otherwise you get revolt. They're getting revolt because they're moving too fast and they're just going for everything. And people have big concerns about AI. And so I think they are in this narrow time frame of needing to bully everyone to get their way, to get their lack of regulation locked in. But I think they're meeting some resistance, and they're probably upset because the Trump family's gotten like $5 billion in crypto wealth over the past 10 months. And hell, how much do you need to give us everything we want? Well, you made a deal with the devil, and he's never going to give you everything you want. He's terrified. He knows you want him gone.

But the crypto thing is a real problem, and I think a thing that needs to happen is we need to stigmatize crypto very strongly. It must become unacceptable for Democrats to accept crypto money. If a Democrat is accepting crypto money, they are buying into a dark, anti-American, anti-democratic vision of the future. And if you don't believe me, well then ask them: exactly what is crypto for, Senator? Exactly what is crypto for, Representative? Can you explain to me why anybody needs this? "To hedge against the failure of the dollar"—well, isn't it your job to make sure the dollar doesn't fail?

I mean, this is insane that you even have to have this conversation. But I think we need to start regarding anybody who is pro-crypto or who accepts crypto money as deeply suspicious, as on the other side. And then you can take away—it has to be that even when they spend billions of dollars or millions of dollars in campaigns, that it only works against them. We've seen that in California when billionaires try to buy office. Their spending turns everyone off and turns against them. When I worked in politics, I saw many focus groups that show an immediate drop in support when it's a rich person trying to fund the whole thing.

So it's not something that's going to work 100% of the time, but we need to make it clear that whoever takes the crypto is the Antichrist.

Paris Marx: Yeah, a good way to put it given this conversation. But totally with you on the war on crypto and making that completely unacceptable. If you touch it, you're persona non grata. You've taken the mark of the beast. We'll just go full Thiel here.

Another thing I wanted to ask you—you've brought up this concept of hyperstition several times throughout the conversation. I was wondering if you could flesh that out a little bit more for us. Tell us what this actually is, where this concept comes from, and how you see it being deployed by these folks in the tech industry to try to serve their ends.

Gil Duran: Hyperstition comes from Nick Land, who's like the father of accelerationism and also a big part of the Dark Enlightenment movement with Curtis Yarvin. He had a lot of these ideas about leaving behind humanity, and a lot of them are very drug-addled, hard to read. I spent way too much time this summer trying to read Nick Land and realized that I didn't have to go through every single piece of it. I could get the gist, and there are some key parts of it.

So hyperstition is a portmanteau, combined word of "hype" and "superstition." And the idea is that you can manifest reality through telling stories. And you tell stories that spread, and you repeat them until people believe them, until they become real.

In a way, in the '90s there was a book called The Secret that even Oprah was pushing, about "if you just—here's how you manifest the life you want." And even before that, in like the '40s or '30s, Norman Vincent Peale wrote The Power of Positive Thinking—that through positive thinking you can make things happen. And there's some truth to that: being positive, going after what—being motivated.

But they call it hyperstition. And what they mean by that—the other word for that is basically propaganda. How do you tell a narrative? How do you tell a story that shapes reality? And there's a lot of words for that. Propaganda is one of those words. Strategic communications is one of those words. Another word they like to use is "memetic warfare." And memetic warfare is a tactic or strategy of hyperstition.

And we largely see that happening today with a lot of things they're doing: with the apocalypse, with AI. They just try to have a story that people believe, and that then generates money for them. Venture capital is pretty much based on hyperstition—imagining something and then making that thing happen.

And Katherine Boyle, who started off with an internship that Peter Thiel got her at Founders Fund, who's now at Andreessen Horowitz pushing something she calls American Dynamism—which is sort of a pitch deck version of white nationalism militarism, literally fusing religion, the state, and capitalism; I think Mussolini had a word for that one—but she says, "Meme it and we will be it."

So that's what hyperstition is. Let's create a meme, an idea, get everybody talking about it: "Oh, Silicon Valley is the agent of Christ," or "We don't need Earth anymore, we're going to live on Mars," or "AI is God, and don't worry, there will be jobs."

By the way, when they talk about AI eliminating all the jobs—which is their big dream; I'm not sure if that's true or not, but that's their stated result—they talk about, "Well, we're all going to get paid by this somehow. We're all going to have a profit." Isn't that Silicon Valley socialism?

Again, I'm telling you, they're trying to prove Marx here. Like, if I were running the Democratic Party, I would be explaining to all the people in MAGA land how they're going to put socialism on you with the AI. And instead of having socialism with the AI, we should have healthcare and jobs and nobody should ever be homeless. No socialism—let's just have all of our needs met. Let's just use a different term for it.

Paris Marx: Well, yeah, what are they talking about?

Gil Duran: Well, if you look at The Sovereign Individual, which is this book that inspired Peter Thiel's thinking, AI was going to lead to the complete collapse of society and massive violence because of the lack of jobs. People don't have food, they don't have money, they're going to steal, they're going to fight, they're going to kill. So then why do you have all these billionaires so crying about crime and wanting cameras everywhere and wanting mass incarceration if your entire stated plan is to collapse the economy and create a violent criminal future?

A lot of internal contradictions in this particular capitalization that seemed to be destined to lead to its complete collapse at some point. But anyway, that's a conversation for another day.

Paris Marx: Definitely, definitely. And I'm sure you'll be back on to talk about it. But when you talk about the notion of hyperstition and hearing you describe it, to me it kind of echoes basically what the tech industry does. It kind of makes up this story constantly that this new technology or this new product or whatever it's going to be is the next big thing that's going to transform our lives in so many different ways. It's going to be incredible. It's going to create so much wealth and prosperity and what have you. And then we see all the valuations of the companies and stuff that are working on that particular product explode for a while. And then give it two or three years, and all the claims that they supposedly made don't seem to come to fruition, and things come back down to earth just in time for them to come up with a new thing that is going to change the world in so many different ways.

It feels like it's very much part of the way that they work. But now instead of just using it to try to kind of hype up a particular product and try to make money off the market and share values and company values and things like that, it seems like they're now weaponizing it much more to try to affect the way that we see the future, the political system, to try to affect a much broader swath of reality than what they tried to seize and to control in the past.

Gil Duran: Oh, definitely. They've run out of unicorns, so they need a new mythical creature to hunt. And that creature is godlike AI or the Antichrist or getting rid of the United States and having Network States or getting rid of the Earth and going to Mars. It's end-stage venture capital. They're having an existential crisis, and they want to impose that on the rest of us because they feel like that's where the trillion-dollar opportunities are.

How do we liquidate all of the work and the blood and the sweat and the tears that went into this country and make sure a handful of men get rich and powerful off of it? Venture capital is all about exit—how do you leave a company at a point where everyone sees its peak value, take yours, and get on to the next thing?

They're trying to exit democracy. They're trying to exit Earth. They're trying to exit mortality. And they're trying to—no, they're not trying to—they're literally exiting reality. And it's time to put a stop to that.

We have to be like, "Yeah, no. If we can give Elon Musk a trillion dollars, we can have daycare and healthcare and all these other things." And so while they have shown the power of hyperstition, it's a technology that's also available to us. We can dream too. We can also imagine a future, and I think we need to do more of that.

I think lately in the States anyway, there's been a lot of fear: "Oh, it's a fascist country now. It's not a democracy." Like, shut up. Please go hide your face in your pillow and scream all your fear there. We need to be brave. We need to be strong. And we need to make it clear that the future is not going to belong to these handful of people in any circumstances, even if not all of us are there in that future. We have to be that brave because this is an existential crisis—it's one being forced on us by Silicon Valley.

Paris Marx: Even hearing you say that—we'll see how he actually is able to govern as mayor of New York City—but it felt like Zohran Mamdani kind of used, when you're talking about building a reality, making people see the world in a different way, different possibilities, and what you can actually do with power, it seemed like he was really effective in doing that in a way that we don't typically see of more liberal and progressive politicians in the United States.

Gil Duran: Well, people are pushed off of that. You have to only live in the narrow confines of reality of what's possible by appealing to a centrist platform and if the votes exist for it right now. And look, a few years ago I would have completely told you the same thing, because I come from party school, real city hall and legislative politics. I know how it works. Yeah, the left always wants some crazy shit. They don't got the votes, whatever. Give them something good enough and drag two or three of their votes onto it and win.

But I think we need to change our mentality. And I'd say one thing that inspires me—because you should always find inspiration from your enemies; I think Sun Tzu said that too—is that they are showing us what's possible. Donald Trump is showing us what's possible. Anything's possible. The president can send the troops into cities. The president can make $5 billion off of crypto in plain sight. The president can tear down an entire section of the White House and build an Epstein ballroom. Elon Musk can give a Hitler salute at the inauguration and get a trillion dollars. Peter Thiel, the most likely candidate for Antichrist, can go around the world calling everyone else the Antichrist.

We can do that too. And we can do that for good, not for evil. In all the stories in the Bible, in Lord of the Rings, and science fiction, there's a good side and there's a bad side of the same energy. So let's understand the power, the force of hyperstition, and let's start putting it to use sooner rather than later. And I think the more that people do that and understand it, the better it will be, because anything is possible now. And if we don't wake up and start acting, then they will be the only ones on the field, and that's where they are right now.

But it's falling apart. Curtis Yarvin is panicked and wants to flee the country. Steve Bannon last week said, "We're all going to go to prison if the Democrats win the midterms"—which says there's going to be midterms. And if there's midterms, we're going to win them.

So they are scared. They're way out there. I would much rather be in our shoes than theirs, because believe me, there's a lot of things I would do, but overthrow the government of the United States of America in plain sight? Not advisable. High penalty for this particular crime.

So I think we have to be hopeful. We have to be active. We have to be motivated. And we have to be optimistic about what the future's going to bring to Silicon Valley.

Paris Marx: Absolutely. I used to joke earlier—what was it, earlier in this tenure of Trump—they were talking about reopening Alcatraz, and I said, "Yeah, let's reopen Alcatraz and let's stick all the tech billionaires in it."

Gil Duran: Yeah.

Paris Marx: As we start to wrap up this conversation, I'm wondering: obviously we've talked about these lectures that Peter Thiel did, all of his rambling about the Antichrist. What have you made of the response to it? Have you been hopeful seeing how people generally have responded to just the crazy things that he is saying?

Gil Duran: When you get roasted on South Park and Joe Rogan, you're done. This was a real flop on Thiel's part. And I don't know who's advising him, but he needs to fire them, get a new therapist. I don't know.

The fact that it went this far—actually, Tim Dillon said this on the Joe Rogan podcast—there's nobody around him who said no. Four lectures on the Antichrist? Maybe no lectures on the Antichrist.

I think it woke some people up to what the hell's going on with this guy. I was actually in a public place recently, and I heard someone explaining Peter Thiel Antichrist and the JD Vance connection to someone on the phone. And I was like, my heart was so warmed. Like, he has really broken through with this. And I think it's a warning sign for people of how crazy it's getting.

This is a guy who's behind Trump, who has a $10 billion contract with the US Army to consolidate all of its contracts, whose company is busy plugging into data all over the world from governments. There's a federal database being created of information on every American, and this is what he's doing. If I were him, I'd be quiet. People wouldn't know my name. That's another way to do things.

So I'm glad in a way that he's doing what he's doing. He's advertising the crisis and raising awareness of the problem—so the problem being him. So yeah, I think it was a massive mistake. It's nothing you would ever advise anybody to do. But again, these guys think they're so smart and they're not.

My mom used to tell me when I was a kid, "You know, you're so smart you're stupid," because there were things that I really was good at and things I was really, really bad at. And that was the way she put it. And it reminds me of these guys now. What madness would possess you to go around talking about the goddamn Antichrist right now in the middle of all of this? Not the time.

But in a way, the perfect time, because people need to understand: this is where we are. Yo, Peter Thiel Antichrist lecture series—that's the point in history we've reached.

Paris Marx: I think maybe my final question would be: when we think about Peter Thiel, I feel like we often had this narrative of him that he was often kind of operating behind the scenes. He had his levers on the power, but you couldn't often see it. He was this kind of mastermind in how he was pulling the levers and the strings and all these sorts of things. He was obviously someone who got behind Trump early back in the 2016 campaign, kind of put his head out there and made it easier, I guess, for a lot more of these tech people to justify getting behind him in the years that came later.

And I wonder, seeing how he has progressed over the past number of years, do you think he still has that influence behind the scenes that he used to have? You mentioned someone like Katherine Boyle who had this relationship to him. He has a number of kind of acolytes out there, it seems. Or do you feel like it's kind of reaching the point where he might have had this influence in the past—maybe that was even exaggerated to a certain degree—but do you feel like that is waning? Do you feel like his influence is harder to see? Or does it feel like he is just kind of increasingly losing it and we're all just kind of watching his spiral?

Gil Duran: I think he's at the height of his power. A lot of what's happening now came from his brain. He's been thinking about this for a long time. But I think he's blowing it. I don't think he had it all figured out. And the fact that he's out there talking about the Antichrist shows the degree to which this is not motivated by logical strategy—it's motivated by something more akin to religion, to religious delusion in particular.

And we see that in a lot of Silicon Valley—a religious delusion. Some of them, I'm not sure about Thiel. Some of them definitely doing drugs. I mean, a lot of the Yarvin stuff comes out of LSD abuse. He tells the story himself if you look carefully enough at his podcasts and stuff. He wants you to know that was a big inspiration for him.

And the problem is, when you're just telling these little fantasies and fairy tales and you're disregarding history and the experience of other people who are more directly involved in matters like politics, there's a lot you don't understand. Like the fact that just firing a bunch of people from the government willy-nilly will lead to problems that force you to hire a lot of those people back.

I have a lot of criticism for the people in charge of things, but there's a lot of expertise in government that if you don't have it and you just take something out, there's a reason that thing was created over time. And it's not a perfect system. There's never a perfect system. I don't believe in perfect systems. But these people, the tech people, do, and that's a big flaw that they have.

You're never going to have a world without crime. You're never going to have a world where there's no addiction or dysfunction. But you create systems that avoid those, create systems that don't create more crime—like not having poverty, you'll have less people hungry, stealing, needing to do crime. But they want to create perfect systems through control and coercion and surveillance and through getting rid of government. But that was just a massive fail. You can't just do that.

So they don't have it all figured out, and I don't think they have a plan for what happens when everybody is really, really angry at what the billionaires tried to do to us.

Paris Marx: Yeah, it definitely seems that way. Gil, it's always great to get your insights into all this. I'm really looking forward to the book once it's ready and out there, because I'm sure there's going to be some fantastic stuff in there. I really appreciate you taking the time to come back on the show. Thanks so much.

Gil Duran: Yeah, and you got to come on my podcast too.

Paris Marx: Happy to do it. Happy to do it.

Gil Duran writes the Nerd Reich newsletter and is working on his first book which shares the same title. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marx. Production is by Kyla Houston.

Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com/techwontSaveUs and making a pledge of your own.

Thanks for listening, and make sure to come back next week.

The Financial Times is the latest mainstream newspaper to discover the existence of the Network State cult. In a story headlined “Tech elites are starting their own for-profit cities,” FT writer Hannah Murphy outlines the basics of the movement to create new tech-controlled fascist cities all over the world.

This once seemed like a fringe idea, and most major news outlets have ignored it. That is changing.

Writes Murphy:

But what was a fringe concept a matter of years ago is now attracting more interest as scrappy start-up chief executives and aggrieved billionaires contemplate the allure of tech-friendly havens unbound by legacy rules and regulation.

While some are aspirational, reliant on their founders securing hard-to-come-by special economic zone status, there are now about 120 “start-up societies” in the works, according to an open-source database shared by Srinivasan.

A few have received hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital from funds backed by the likes of investors Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, OpenAI founder Sam Altman and Brian Armstrong, Coinbase chief executive.

The story whitewashes some aspects of the Network State cult. It makes no mention of Balaji Srinivasan’s fascist vision for a tech “Gray Tribe” that teams up with police to purge the Democratic “Blue Tribe” from San Francisco, or the fact that Srinivasan predicts the USA is headed toward civil war.

It describes the Praxis network state—funded by Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman—as “whimsical and rebellious.” (Ignoring the fact that the Praxis website predicts the decline of nation-states and is coded with fascist messaging about restoring Western values.) It describes Praxis CEO Dryden Brown as “a homeschooled professional surfer with a penchant for Austrian economics,” ignoring his vicious anti-LGBTQ pride rant over the summer and his current role in spreading a debunked “white genocide” conspiracy theory about South Africa.

“Próspera shuns the ‘network state’ label,” writes Murphy.

Yet the project is listed on Srinivasan’s official Network State dashboard.

However, the story also has some gems. Murphy explains that the idea of the Network State can be traced back to Curtis Yarvin and his idea for corporate-ruled “patchworks.” (Many people miss this key point.)

And it has an amazing end paragraph, in which Thiel protégé Patri Friedman shrugs off concerns about colonialism and techno-fascism:

Patri Friedman initially pushes back on the notion of these projects as neocolonialist, declaring “most of our projects are greenfield”.

He pauses. “Although, in Africa, we are looking at land parcels large enough that there will be people living there, in which case we will offer relocation bonuses to pay for anybody who wants to move out of the zone.”

And what about fears that this marks the rise of techno-fascism?

“I mean, we are funding companies that will operate non-democratic cities,” he says, shrugging. “And if you’re not into that you shouldn’t move there.”

Click here to read the story. (Paywall possible)

It’s good to see major outlets like the venerable FT taking notice of this important story. This is progress, despite the soft focus. But the plan for these corporate dystopia cities is just the tip of the Network State iceberg. This is a full-stack fascist ideology with plans to scrap democracy and remake the world.

Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire member of the “PayPal Mafia” who is also a co-founder of Palantir, wants a return to draconian punishment and public executions in the United States.

Wrote Lonsdale on X yesterday:

If I'm in charge later, we won't just have a three strikes law. We will quickly try and hang men after three violent crimes.

And yes, we will do it in public to deter others.

Our society needs balance. It’s time to bring back masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable.

The venture capitalist was responding to a writer who had criticized Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s enthusiastic tweets about murdering people on boats in the Caribbean.

On December 4, Andrew Kolvet—a spokesman for Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA—praised Hegseth for his bombing campaign against fishing boats, which he accuses of drug smuggling. Critics say the bombings, which have killed scores of people without due process, may constitute murder or war crimes.

“Every new attack aimed at Pete Hegseth makes me want another narco drug boat blown up and sent to the bottom of the ocean,” wrote Kolvet.

“Your wish is our command, Andrew. Just sunk another narco boat,” replied Hegseth.

When Australian writer Claire Lehmann criticized Hegseth’s post as “grotesque,” Lonsdale responded, declaring that sinking the boats “helps publicly deter others” and “killing bad guys” is Hegseth’s job.

“Masculine truth: bold, virtuous men deter evil,” wrote Lonsdale.

In his subsequent post, he unveiled his fantasy of a future in which he, put in charge, erodes due process, expands the use of the death penalty, and revives public hangings.

This public fetishization of state violence—framed explicitly as “masculine truth” and virtuous protection—suggests tech elites are entering a more dangerous and desperate phase of radicalization.

For months, Peter Thiel guru Curtis Yarvin has been squawking about the need for more severe measures to cement Trump's authoritarian rule. Peter Thiel is ranting about the Antichrist in a global tour. And now Lonsdale—a Thiel protégé—is fantasizing about a future in which he will have the power to unleash state violence at mass scale.

The meme is spreading. Where is it heading?

Live Chat With Strongmen author Ruth Ben-Ghiat

I’ll analyze this during a live video chat with historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat at 8 p.m. EST on Sunday, December 7.

Ben-Ghiat is the author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present and one of the foremost experts on authoritarian leaders and the tactics they use to capture and consolidate power.

Her book details the core tenets of strongman rule: the fetishization of hyper-masculinity and violence, the erosion of due process, the cultivation of cults of personality. I read Strongmen when it was published in 2020 and it was essential to my understanding of authoritarianism (years before I stumbled into my study of tech fascism).

We’ll have plenty to discuss! Details at Lucid, Ben-Ghiat’s newsletter. Click here.

Pre-Order The Nerd Reich Book!

The radicalization of Silicon Valley is the subject of my forthcoming book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and The War on Democracy.

It exposes a decades-long campaign to use tech power to overthrow democracy and destroy nations. Please pre-order a copy today!

• Buy the The Nerd Reich book on Bookshop
• Buy The Nerd Reich book on Amazon
• Buy The Nerd Reich book at Barnes & Noble
• Buy The Nerd Reich book at Hudson Booksellers
• Buy The Nerd Reich book at Target
• Buy The Nerd Reich book at Books A Million
• Buy The Nerd Reich book at Walmart