Remember when Americans wised up about the malevolence of tobacco companies and started treating them like the dangerous forces they were? Gil Duran, author of The Nerd Reich newsletter, says it's past time for the same thing to happen to Silicon Valley.
Watch his conversation with Golden-State co-founder Mariel Garza here, or read a transcript of their talk below.
Mariel Garza: Hello and welcome to another edition of the Golden State Report podcast. I'm your host, Mariel Garza. If you're watching this on YouTube, please click the like button below and consider subscribing wherever you are listening. It really helps us out. My guest today is Gil Duran, San Francisco journalist who has made it his mission to chronicle tech fascism in Silicon Valley.
He writes on the Nerd Reich newsletter and has a podcast. He's currently finishing up a book titled, "The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy."
He's a former editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee and the San Francisco Examiner. I first met Gil back in the aughts when he was press secretary to former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. He later served in a similar role for Gov. Jerry Brown, Kamala Harris when she was attorney general (of) California, U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein and I'm probably forgetting a whole bunch of other people. Thanks for joining us, Gil.
First off, the name, the Nerd Reich – it's hilarious. Where did that come from?
Gil Duran: Well, after I had written a few stories about this topic of radicalization in Silicon Valley and certain venture capitalists and others who had become radicalized into very right-wing politics, someone reached out to me from the crypto world on Twitter in a DM, a direct message. And they said, you know, we've been calling these guys the Nerd Reich for years. And I thought that was pretty hilarious. And I looked around and nobody was really using it effectively.
So I grabbed the website and I rebranded my own newsletter, which had a different name back then, as the Nerd Reich. And at the time, I don't know, I had like 40 subscribers and then boom, it ended up growing and becoming a book with the name "The Nerd Reich."
Mariel Garza
Garza: You started off writing this, the Nerd Reich newsletter, in 2024. Talk about why – what did you see that was happening that you thought that the world needed to know about?
Duran: Well, I was covering politics in San Francisco as editorial page editor of the Examiner. And when I first got to San Francisco, the politics seemed kind of boring. I had just come from Sacramento where there was a recall going on against the governor and all of it had been a very dramatic period in Sacramento and capital history. And suddenly San Francisco seemed like a sleepy backwater. I had like a week to write a long piece on the history of housing policy and there was nothing going on, but that very quickly changed because the recall fever came to San Francisco and it landed on four different elected officials, members of the school board and the D.A. And what was interesting about those recalls is they would have had no chance of succeeding if there hadn't been for a massive influx of money both from a Republican billionaire and a bunch of venture capitalists who claimed to be Democrats, but were just really pushing this radical line and we have to recall all of these politicians.
And look, there was some legitimate frustration with some of those politicians. But having been very, very familiar with California politics, including in the Bay Area where I got my start, it was highly unusual to see the rapid growth of this recall hysteria funded by very wealthy people. And suddenly there were all these sort of propaganda operations, these influencers who came out of nowhere.
And suddenly were bigger than every journalist combined, you know, just with their cameras, people professing to have once been progressives and now they see the light and they want to lock everybody up.
So there was this real strange push, propaganda push in my opinion, toward this sort of right-wing...
Garza: AstroTurf?
Duran: Yeah, sort of an AstroTurfed propaganda push toward right-wing politics and these venture capitalists who had mostly been doing whatever they do in the shadows, making lots of money, suddenly became the loudest voices in politics. And so that raised for me the question of what was going on. And I didn't see it immediately. It took some time.
But I left the Examiner after a year. The recalls were successful. And it took a while longer for me to sort of realize that what I had seen was a phenomenon that others had tried to warn people about for decades, and that was finally coming to fruition, which would peak with Elon Musk throwing a Hitler salute at the inauguration and then becoming the head of something called DOGE.
Garza: Can we talk about who the players are in San Francisco? Because Silicon Valley, when we think of Silicon Valley, we think of big tech companies down on the Peninsula. But more and more, San Francisco has become sort of, I think the heart of what we think of as San Francisco, a place where the tech elite live and operate. So can we just talk about who are the big players who I think you call the "lords of tech" in some of your pieces?
Duran: In the San Francisco recall, there were two main tech voices. One was David Sacks, who's a member of something called the PayPal mafia, which was the group of men who started PayPal back in the late 90s, early 2000s, including Musk, Peter Thiel and others. And the other was Garry Tan, the head of Y Combinator, which is the famed startup accelerator in San Francisco, which sort of invests money in up-and-coming companies, takes a portion of the company and then puts the founders through this sort of program to get them to sell their company, to put them in the best position to do that.
And Garry Tan, his origins are in Palantir with Peter Thiel. And so I started to notice there was this network of interconnected venture capitalists who all have like similar backgrounds and all have a pretty big connection to Peter Thiel. And there was an interesting moment that took place actually where Peter Thiel came to a church that Garry Tan owns in the Mission District or near Dolores Park and gave a whole talk on Jesus with Garry Tan.
And it was sort of like there were activists actually trying to point out that a lot of these people had these connections. You know, Garry Tan claims to be a moderate Democrat, though he has nothing to say against Donald Trump. I've looked through all of his tweets. There's never a criticism of Trump, only a criticism of, you know, even now still attacking (former San Francisco District Attorney) Chesa Boudin, who's been out of office for years.
So there was this, those were the two main voices there. But as you zoom out to the more national picture, you see that the same connected group of people is now operating in collaboration with the administration.
David Sacks, who started off in San Francisco politics howling about crime and homelessness and funding the recalls, is now Donald Trump's czar for crypto and AI. Elon Musk, who bought Twitter, which was on Market Street and a big famous San Francisco business, is the head of DOGE.
Here's a way to kind of, think, tie it all together. Elon Musk buys Twitter in 2022. And when he guts it, he purges a bunch of employees, completely changes how it operates. And now it's a very different thing than it was prior to Elon Musk.
And if you listen to Garry Tan, who made a lot of public declarations about these things, he says that the idea was basically, you know, look at what Elon did to Twitter, right? That's what we can do to San Francisco. That's what we can do everywhere. The idea is that tech moguls take over something, whether it's a city or a company or a publication, as we've seen with the Washington Post, and you can take that institution that exists, hollow it out and remake it as a new institution that serves their purposes. So that's a way to tie it together.
And at the heart of it all that all of that is Peter Thiel, who is the big thinker on a lot of this stuff. So what I discovered watching these piecemeal things with David Sacks, Garry Tan trying to take over San Francisco, and then Sacks getting bumped up to Washington and with, you know, Elon Musk going on this radicalization ride during the pandemic through buying Twitter to throwing a Hitler salute at the inauguration, what I eventually came to realize was that there's been this whole ideological movement in Silicon Valley for decades to remake the world in a way that will put tech gazillionaires at the top of the pyramid for all of eternity.
Garza: Is this what you mean by tech fascism?
Duran: Yes, tech fascism. And part of why it's tech fascism is that it has melded with MAGA fascism because they see that as the quickest route to attaining their goals. And that's what's happening right now. Like why are suddenly all of the Silicon Valley venture capitalists and gazillionaires with Donald Trump, right? Even the ones who aren't politically radical in their own voice like (Apple Chief Executive) Tim Cook are bowing down, bringing him gold trinkets. No one has a bad word to say about what's happening to this country when it's under an authoritarian attack.
And if you look back through history, there's been this idea that somehow techies were kind of liberal and had playgrounds in their offices and were fun. And the reality is that for a very long time, there's been this undercurrent of a libertarian idea that has curdled into authoritarian fascist politics in the era of Trump.
Garza: Definitely, you're right about this. There was this idea that tech was, and the internet in particular, and social media, was the savior of democracy. It was the thing that democratized the soapbox, that allowed people to reach other people, to connect with other people, that there was no gatekeeper. And you really did see Silicon Valley project that idea, the old Google "don't be evil."
What happened? Are you mask came off and this was what was really underneath? Or was there some sort of catalyst that you think has sort of shifted thinking the tech elite sort of radicalized them, if you will?
Duran: I think it's all of the above. If you have to tell yourself, don't be evil, well then you're thinking of being evil. You're aware that evil is a possibility on your journey. And Google got rid of that, that motto.
And I do a lot of work with George Lakoff, the cognitive scientist. And he says, "Don't think of an elephant." When you negate an idea, when you say, "Don't do something," you're putting the idea in the person's mind. If I say, "Don't think of an elephant," you have to think of an elephant in order to not think of an elephant. You say, "Don't be evil," you're literally evoking the idea of evil. Evil is what comes to mind. So I think it was always there to some degree.
I think a lot of these guys understood the degree to which technology would be a tool for fundamentally transforming how the entire world works. They knew that it would generate massive amounts of wealth. And I think the other radicalizing factor there is the ungodly amount of wealth these people have amassed.
They have stopped being normal human beings and they view themselves as superior. And this is what is infecting their politics.
Garza: One of the things that you write a lot about and sort of just recently is the increase in the religious talk and references by a lot of elite. And I think we have to talk about Peter Thiel's secret invitation-only four-part series.
What is going on there? What do you make of this discussion centered around religion? Is it just people legitimately looking to save their souls?
Duran: Not at all. I call it the godless gospel, what's happening in Silicon Valley. There's two religions. One is this new tech religion where tech is going to give you eternal life and it's going to give you a promised land and it's going to make you one the chosen ones and it's going to give you God in the form of super intelligence. And this is a bundle beliefs that has been labeled test screel, transhumanism, extropianism, singulatarianism, cosmism, effective altruism and long-termism.
That's a lot to unpack there. But in a nutshell, it's this idea of tech superiority. Technology is going to solve everything. If we only believe in it, we will go all the way. Yeah, we are going to accelerate beyond human. We're going to another planet. We're going to travel through the stars as creatures made of AI that don't die.
Garza: Yeah. It's God. Tech is God.
Duran: Now that sounds insane, but there are people who are thinking like this in Silicon Valley. At the very least, you know, Elon Musk claims we're going to go live on Mars, Earth is done or whatever. You can't live on Mars. You'd have to live underground. You'd have to raise your children underground. You know, as I interviewed astrophysicist Adam Becker about this – the dirt is poison. You know, there's no atmosphere. I mean, there's no reason why we would leave this planet to go live on Mars, but there's all these weird beliefs that are swirling in Silicon Valley that are the actual religion of Silicon Valley.
And you can wrap this up in a word they use called accelerationism, this idea that we must accelerate into the future, like willy-nilly into this technological utopia that will be waiting for us if we get there, which will be very destructive on the way to it. But this religion assumes that a lot of people will die, but those of us who make it will be the eternal ones. A very religious, culty idea.
What's happening in my opinion is that some of these folks in Silicon Valley realize that that's scary to most And so what you're trying to do is put a mask of Christianity on it and make it seem as if tech is a Christian movement. Tech is going to achieve all of the things that Jesus said and there's going to be abundance in the utopia that we build and we're going to defeat death. We're going to have, you know, and I think the reason some people are doing that is because of the political situation in which in order to achieve this shift in our politics that's necessary to their getting free of regulations and free of democracy, which is what these tech billionaires are after.
They have to partner with the Republican Party, and the evangelical base is very powerful in the Republican Party. And so I see it as part of a coalition they're trying to build. And in fact, this is not just my opinion. One of the main thinkers on this stuff is a guy named Balaji Srinivasan, who's a former Andreessen Horowitz partner and a former chief technology officer at Coinbase. And he writes that the tech people will need to be a "gray" tribe as opposed to the blue tribe that's Democrats and the red tribe that's Republicans.
One of the partners of the great tribe to defeat the blue tribe will be the red tribe, specifically the part of the red tribe that is called the red god, which is the religious right. This was all spelled out in his book in 2022.
So, this is the way they are thinking about these things. And so, when I look at Peter Thiel going around speaking about the Antichrist, when he speaks about the Antichrist, first of all, he mixes up a bunch of things. The Antichrist appears twice in the Bible and it means the group of Christians who split off from early Christianity because there was a schism. Those letters are talking about people who existed then, not some future villain. It's been conflated with the beast of revelation, blah, blah. But Peter Thiel is saying the Antichrist is anybody who opposes this technological acceleration is what he's saying.
Garza: You got the transcripts of those lectures, correct? Or at least some of them? What did you make of it? Was it persuasive?
Duran: It's very hard to give a coherent summary of Thiel's Antichrist lectures because it almost seems like every paragraph and in some cases every sentence is a new topic. This is the way he speaks, this sort of dense, sort of spasmodic story he's telling, which I'm sure makes a lot of sense in his head. The way I understand Peter Thiel's Antichrist lectures is by reviewing the entirety of what he's been saying on this subject for a few years.
These recent lectures – he's been giving four lectures, secret lectures on four separate nights in different parts of the world – came out of material he's been developing in public for a few years. All the way back in 2023, he gave a talk at Oxford where he was trying out some of these lines.
And the most important thing to understand about Thiel's Antichrist lectures, if you really want to break it down to what it's about, in my opinion, in my analysis, he connects his Antichrist lectures very closely to the work of Carl Schmitt, who was a Nazi philosopher and jurist. And Carl Schmitt wrote a book called "Political Theology." That's sort of his hallmark. Thiel says his Antichrist speeches are part of his own political theology. And what that means is that in the work of Schmitt, the most important thing in politics is to define who's the friend and who's the enemy.
Second, politics is an existential battle against this enemy. Only one side can win. You have to destroy the enemy.
Three, he wrote that religious concepts are often deployed in politics in a secularized version. You get people to believe in politics by putting a religious framing around things and that there's a – institutions of the state are the institutions of a church essentially.
And four, that one way to seize power, is to declare an existential emergency that allows you to suspend the rules and then do whatever you please after that. That that's the way to short-circuit democratic systems. It's not clear why Nazi philosophy would be a part of a biblical lecture.
But the other thing that Thiel connects it to is the work of René Girard, who was a Catholic theologian who was at Stanford when Thiel was there. And René Girard noticed that or observed that human societies tend to engage in cycles of scapegoating, finding people to blame for all the problems. And this is sort of an endless cycle of violence and that people tend to mimic one another. Your desires don't come from you. They come from what you see around you. The desire is manufactured in society.
I know this is a lot to unpack, but basically what I break it down to is that Peter Thiel is saying that there is a tremendous amount of power in apocalyptic ideas and religious ideas that can be deployed in politics to unite people against the common enemy, who is then scapegoated for all of our problems, allowing our side to win. And what he's saying is that we have to identify the Antichrist and blame the Antichrist or we will be the Antichrist.
Garza: And why does that matter to, you know, us regular non-techno billionaire folks? How is that going to come back on me and you?
Duran: If you look at DOGE, which has done tremendous damage to our government and which probably still is, we don't know what they're doing with all this AI surveillance stuff they've unleashed in our government, there's no transparency on that. These ideas have been bandied about in Silicon Valley for quite some time. The idea of purging government comes from Curtis Yarvin, the San Francisco programmer who is one of Thiel's favorite thinkers and who back in 2008 was some anonymous nerd writing a blog, and now his ideas have done billions of dollars in damage to our government. In fact, the cuts to USAID, according to a study that was published in The Lancet, will kill 14 million people by 2030.
Garza: Is it a business strategy or is this is there something more?
Duran: Well, the core idea is that democracy is an outdated system and it's in need of an upgrade. And that upgrade involves dissolving the United States of America into a patchwork of smaller nations that are basically ruled by corporations. These are called patchworks network states, and that this new network state will replace the nation state in the 21st century.
And in the future, we will have these corporate dystopias basically that will now be the reigning governing force on much of the planet against China and Russia. So these guys are comfortable living in a world with China and Russia in it, but apparently not with the United States in it. If you read Balaji Srinivasan, who I mentioned before, he has a whole book that's free to read online. It's called "The Network State: How to Start a New Country."
And so there's been a lot of emphasis in this venture capital cult on investing in projects to create new cities and new territories and special economic zones, because these are the escape hatches into which they plan to escape. So there's this apocalyptic mindset, and it stems from the fact that they believe that technological advances like AI are going to completely collapse the economy, collapse jobs, and collapse, therefore, civil society in the United States of America.
And they need somewhere to go when that happens. This is their cosmology, their eschatology.
Garza: Isn't this kind of self-defeating? Look at Tesla and Elon Musk who built his company with the help of the government. I mean, all these technologies have benefited by publicly supported research and innovation and the innovation that you get from an open democracy, capitalistic society that has sort of built and supported this. Is he shooting his own industry in the foot?
Duran: Well, they plan to have the federal government as their revenue host in this scenario. And look at what's happening. All the contracts going to xAI, and Palantir has $10 billion from the Army. They are feasting on this. And the idea is to get on the trillion-dollar spigot of government and then use that to undermine the government.
And as for Elon, I mean, nothing that he's done in the past four years has been good for Tesla in terms of the customer base, which was mostly eco-conscious liberals with money. Throwing the Hitler salute should have been the end of Tesla, should have been the end of Musk. But we are way beyond that. For some reason, nobody, including Democrats, seems to be willing to hold these people accountable. And they know that.
Garza: California has been uniquely poised to do the kind of regulation that the federal government isn't able to do, but yet it hasn't been able to. Why do you think that is?
Duran: As we're seeing in Sacramento, the Democrats are every bit as corruptible as the Republicans. And I'm not going to go into details.
Garza: So it's money? Is that it?
Duran: Oh yeah.
Garza: Or is there just a fundamental misunderstanding of what tech is up to and even how to regulate?
I remember when, a couple years ago, when there were efforts to regulate social media access and privacy for minors, there was a huge, huge pushback, and ultimately all that legislation was watered down. It just about money or do the legislators in California just not know how to fight the tech industry or how to rein it?
Duran: Well, I'd say the legislators are dumb, they're cowardly and they love the money. So it's all three in my opinion. There are people who know about this stuff. They're not going to say anything about it. No one's going to take on Silicon Valley. You have the largest, most powerful, wealthiest industry here that is overtly aligning with fascism.
And it's nice that the governor wants to tweet memes at Trump. But why don't you say something about Andreessen Horowitz? Why don't you say something about all of these venture capitalists who are loudly cheering for this administration as it does these horrific things, including sending armed masked men and the military into our cities to terrorize people? Not one word of criticism.
And if it is, it's very, very mild and does not betray the full extent to which this has gotten completely out of hand.
And my biggest fear is that the Democrats will be corrupted by this stuff. I think the Republican project is going to fail. I think Trump is – they're moving too fast, too quick. They're destroying too much. It's not working. But I think they'll get a lot farther with Democrats on a much slower trajectory is my analysis.
Garza: Hmm, you think this is gonna come up in the governor's race? You knew I was gonna turn this to the governor's race at some point.
Duran: I hope it will. My book comes out year and I am definitely going to be making a lot more noise about the fact that no one will take on Silicon Valley. I think if we had any courageous people in our political would be a lot of moderating force on some of these people.
Look at what happened when people hissed at (Salesforce Chief Executive) Marc Benioff for calling on Trump to send in the military. He backed down. Ron Conway resigned from the board and criticized him. These people are very thin skinned. They're very easy to push, but no one will do it. And it's not clear why.
Our politicians are even more cowardly than the Silicon Valley guys are. And so if no one's going to take on Silicon Valley, if no one's going to bring them to heel and put them in their place, then I don't really see what the future is going to be except a tech-fascist dystopia.
I'm hopeful. I'm not sure who could really do it since so many of these people are going to be begging for tech money. And then you have one billionaire in the race now, or there's two. The other one, (Stephen J.) Cloobeck is clueless. I think (Tom) Steyer could take these guys on. I'm not really sure it's his style to take people on, maybe oil companies. We've got some experience taking on oil companies and tobacco companies.
The position we're in now, you really have to view Silicon Valley as even more evil than oil companies and tobacco companies because they're going to just intensify and amplify the damage that those sorts of industries do.
We'll see. It should be an issue, but I'm at a point with the establishment where I spent most of my career, as you mentioned at beginning of the show, where I don't expect them to be the ones who save us.
The only way the dynamic will change is if we get a class of politicians who are not the teat of billionaires, which is what we have. I don't like the idea of a billionaire running for office, what Steyer's doing. At the same time, I don't like the idea of people who are begging billionaires for money all day running for office.
I don't see how any Democrats are to take on the billionaire class as long as they need billionaire money. And the party as an establishment is not making space for those people. You have people like and others starting to voice this Bernie Sanders is very much on that, Elizabeth Warren, Katie Porter was, you know, one of the things I admired about her was her willingness to take on these folks, and they came after her with $10 million in her Senate race, right?
So there's a price to be paid for taking them on. But I do think we're reaching a point where people are realizing who the real enemy is, to get back to the scapegoating Antichrist.
All of the wealth is going to the top 1%. Everyone else is falling behind. And the argument seems to be like, well, that's fair and that's good. And I'm going to do all of these little things like an earned income tax credit by golly, you know, a jobs plan of some kind and do it while taking money from the very billionaires who are benefiting the most while everyone else loses. So I don't see how a system designed in this way is to have any success in doing that.
At the same time, I mean – to be clear, I'm hopeful. One good thing about this moment is that the oligarchs are showing us that anything is possible. Anything is possible right now. The president's family can make $5 billion off a crypto in eight months. There's no more rules, so let's stop playing this middle-of-the-road game and think about how do we really solve the problems of the 21st century? We literally have a planet that's going to become unlivable and we can't do anything about it except little interim measures. So we have to think a lot bigger, and I think the younger generation that's coming up will help us to do that.
Garza: The vice president has a role in sort of the roving characters that you talk about. Can you spell it out for us?
Duran: The most important thing to understand about JD Vance is that he is almost entirely a creation of Peter Thiel, to an astonishing and terrifying degree that I think is not visible to most people on the day to day.
Vance met Thiel when Thiel came to Yale Law School when he was a student at Yale Law School and gave a talk. Vance wrote him an email, got a reply back from Thiel. A few years later, he's working for a Thiel-founded venture capital firm in San Francisco. He didn't make much of an impression there. One colleague didn't even remember him being in the office. His new book had come out and he was touring on that. He decides to go back to Ohio and become a venture capitalist when he starts his own fund – it's with investment from Peter Thiel.
Then he decides to become a politician and he converts to Catholicism and becomes a Trump supporter at the urging with the help of Peter Thiel. He runs for Senate in Ohio and wins after getting an endorsement from Donald Trump with the help from Peter Thiel, because Vance had previously called Trump America's Hitler, compared him to opium and all of these terrible things he said about him.
He wins with $15 million from Thiel, and then when he wants to become vice president, it is Thiel who brokers the peace. And so we have a guy who at every step of the way has gotten to the White House with the help of Peter Thiel. And I know that it seems like everything comes back to Peter Thiel. And it's interesting that that seems to be the case.
So if Vance happens to become president of the United States, it will really be Peter Thiel, in my opinion, who will be the most powerful man in the world. And I know there a lot of people right now calling for Trump to be impeached and want him out of the way, but believe me, this could get a lot worse under JD Vance.
Garza: Why hoes Peter Thiel have so much power? I mean, he did, he's a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir. So obviously he has a lot of money, but there are people who have more money than him and more celebrity. He also seems a little odd. So why is he so powerful in the world of politics?
Duran: These very wealthy men consider him a high-level philosopher because he's a visionary. He talks about the Antichrist. He talks about all of these things. And if you go back, actually, here's one of the reasons. Here's an example of why he's held in such high regard.
You know, back in 1999 – you can find this on YouTube – Peter Thiel gave a speech at the Independent Institute in Oakland where he talked about how the advent of something called cyber currency, a new digital cash would in the 21st century transform everything. Mostly it would undermine the power of governments because now you could evade taxation, you could evade government surveillance on your cash flows, and that this would be something that would be unstoppable and it would change everything. And so this thing has gone viral a few times because wow, Peter Thiel predicts Bitcoin, is the idea. Peter Thiel predicts crypto.
Well, if you look into the actual history of it, people were talking about some kind of digital currency for a long time, even in the 70s, science fiction and libertarian circles. But there was a book in 1997 called "The Sovereign Individual" that came out. It was written by a guy named James Dale Davidson and Sir William Rees-Mogg, who used to be the chief editorial writer for the Financial Times.
The thesis of "The Sovereign Individual," which is sort of a businessy book, but with like apocalyptic kind of framings, was that in the 21st century, technology would fundamentally transform society and politics. And that the mechanization of everything through essentially AI would lead to a complete cratering of jobs and therefore the dissolution of American society into violence and chaos and crime as people no longer had anything they could do for a living for the most part.
This would require a special group of people who have thrived during this period, a so-called cognitive elite, a term taken from eugenics, from racist science, or anti-scientific racism, I should say. And this cognitive elite would escape into these corporate controlled zones that would then become the new power centers as the nation states crumbled, and it was now a total capitalist utopia with no intervening government or democracy to get in the way.
And that book had such a profound effect on Peter Thiel that he has cited it as a reason he went and started PayPal, to try to get ahead of this digital currency trend. And not only that, when "The Sovereign Individual," which I've read cover to cover twice now, came out again in 2020, it was reissued, Peter Thiel wrote the forward to it.
And you read that crazy book and you look at what's happening, the fact that he has been able manifest – or the word they use in Silicon Valley is "hyperstition." It's when you tell a story and spread it around and it becomes real over time. So, Thiel has this power of hyperstition in the opinions of many in Silicon Valley. And he also hyperstitioned Curtis Yarvin. Who would have thought that some anonymous dork blogger in 2008 writing these long-winded screeds about remaking government as an autocracy and purging the federal government would actually become real? But by investing in these ideas, has scaled them. And by scaling them, he has impacted all of our lives.
Garza: Well, the media for the most part relies on tech. Like, a simple decision that Google makes here can wipe out the industry. So is it a surprise the media is a little wary of writing about the sort of fringe theories of really powerful people?
Duran: I'd say it is a surprise because there's something called a conflict of interest. And if all the major journalists have one, well, then they should tell people about that. And people should realize that they can't get those stories from the mainstream press. And it's not because those stories aren't true. It's because the press is making too much money by not telling them. Right. So there's a deep ethical conflict. And there are some, some of these newer things that have started up, they're begging for venture capital money. So they're not going to tell the story.
You know, part of why I started my blog was because there was this reporter at Puck who attacked some reporters in San Francisco who were criticizing some of this stuff. The Guardian and Mission Local did a whole investigation of the gray money network that was flowing into San Francisco to fund the recalls and the organizations behind the recalls, the AstroTurf. And this reporter attacked them for doing that. So what if rich people put money in politics was the idea.
We all popped off back on him. And I looked it up and Puck is begging all kinds of VCs for money. But how dare you, a reporter who claims to cover the wealthy, you attack reporters for doing just that? So that's how these things work these days. And it's not even a surprise to me anymore.
But I do think we should tell people that the press is not covering this because they're getting paid not to cover it or they perceive themselves as being too wrapped up in tech. And even when they do finally cover some of this stuff, it's in this most bland way that does not give people in any way a full idea of the danger here.
And I also feel that if Kamala Harris was connected to a bunch of weird tech cultists with strange ideas, we would be seeing a lot of coverage about it. You know, if Curtis Yarvin was Black and Kamala Harris was the vice president, we would not stop hearing about it until she resigned.
Garza: If, I mean, we all assume that JD Vance will be the presidential nominee in 2020, unless for whatever reason, Trump decides to run again and is allowed to – what do you think if he wins. What do you see as the end game?
Duran: The suspension of democracy and the seizing of power. JD Vance will do anything. He's more dangerous than Trump. Trump is greedy, I think more than anything. And he's getting very old now and doesn't have really the energy level to be full dictator. He makes this threat to execute Congress people and then he backs off of it the same day. He's a Twitter warrior. I think JD Vance is a lot more dangerous.
And one of the things that's going to come into the foreground in the next two years is this idea of so-called freedom cities that's in Trump's agenda. And this idea of establishing at least 10 corporate-controlled territories in the United States that would be their own entities free of regulation, free of laws – this is literally in his plan. And while people have mentioned the freedom cities, no one has explained what they are, why we need them, and where the idea comes from.
This is what we've been talking about. This is this network state idea to create these territories, give these billionaires land, and allow these new zones where the rules don't apply.
