Amy Westervelt
Amy Westervelt is an award-winning investigative print and audio journalist. In 2015, she received a Rachel Carson award for women greening journalism for her role in creating a women-only climate…
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Tech billionaires have increasing influence over all aspects of our lives, and it’s not by accident. Amy Westervelt and Gil Durán both recently published books examining the ideas and individuals driving the phenomenon. They discuss what it has to do with the climate crisis and the deterioration of democracy.
Reading list from today’s show:
1. Gil Durán’s new book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy
2. Amy Westervelt’s new book, Brought to You By: How Corporations Warped the Truth, Conned the Public, and Broke Democracy
3. Lithub interview between Gil and Amy
Pushkin. Hello and welcome to The Spill. I'm Amy Westervelt. This is our weekly newscast in the Drilled feed in between narrative seasons where we bring you conversations amongst ourselves about things that are happening in the climate world and and also interviews with authors, experts, and other interesting folks working on climate. Today I'm excited to bring you an interview I did with author Gil Duran. He wrote the book The Nerd Reich about techno-fascism in Silicon Valley, and he and I talked about a lot of places where our books intersect. My book Brought to You By focuses on the information ecosystem and how corporations have polluted it, including the tech industry with its creation of a whole parallel media ecosystem. And Gil's book focuses on what these guys' ideology is and how and why they became so anti-democratic. It's a really interesting conversation. I hope you enjoy it. A condensed version of this conversation ran earlier this month in Lit Hub. We'll stick a link to that in the show notes. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss our next episode. Now, here's my conversation with Gil.
01:46
Speaker 2
I'm Gil Duran. I'm an independent journalist and I'm the author of The Nerd Reich, Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy.
01:53
Speaker 1
The best named book in the business. When did you come up with the Nerd Reich name?
01:59
Speaker 2
After I had written a few stories on these guys, I had one that went really viral on Balaji Sreenivasan, the former Coinbase CEO, who is the author of this network state cult to build these new tech cities. And someone reached out to me because Balaji and his flying monkeys were attacking me for two days straight on Twitter. And they said, you know, we've been calling this the nerd Reich for years. And this was someone from the crypto world. And I thought, wow. And I looked and the URL was available. No one was really using it. I talked to the folks who were the folks who were using it, weren't using it anymore. So that's where it came from.
02:32
Speaker 1
It's so good. It's like it's just so perfect to describe them. OK, I want to ask you about The Sovereign Individual, this weird little book that Peter Thiel seems to really love. Talk about how how you came across it and and what exactly this book is.
02:50
Speaker 2
In researching the radicalization of Silicon Valley billionaires, it's hard not to come across the sovereign individual. It's this 1997 business doom book. I think Quinn Slobodian called it an apocalypse business book that counseled investors how to prepare for the coming collapse of democracy in the entire world order. And it specifically said that two technologies, cyber currency or crypto and advanced automation, what we would call AI, would lead to the collapse of nations like the United States. But the savvy investors could profit by making the right choices ahead of time to prepare for this new world. So it comes up a lot and it's name checked as this brilliant tome that predicted Bitcoin, which is not true. The authors of The Sovereign Individual largely hashed together older ideas from the cypherpunks. And so that's how I first became aware of it. Now I've read it more times than I would like to admit, but it really became a guiding post, a prophetic text for some influential Silicon Valley billionaires, even though it's a pretty schlocky apocalyptic tome.
03:53
Speaker 1
Yeah, it's not good. And it's super derivative, right? It comes from actually all of these other places. There's a guy that I'm obsessed with named Anthony Fisher, who started one of the first think tanks back in like the 50s, right? He was an adherent of Hayek's and like really into the Mont Pelerin Society and all that stuff. And he started the Institute for Economic Analysis. And then he ended up starting this network called the Atlas Network. That's like, you've probably heard of them. So the way that Peter Thiel is about the sovereign individual, this guy was about the road to serfdom, which is Hayek's big thing. But he actually never read the original. He read the Reader's Digest version.
04:37
Speaker 2
That's all it takes is a summary of the ideas sometimes, you know?
04:41
Speaker 1
Yeah.
04:42
Speaker 2
Yeah.
04:43
Speaker 1
I also, I'm curious for your thoughts on like, A lot of people talk about how the sovereign individual includes this public choice theory notion in it as well. The idea that like no one really cares about the common good and anybody who says otherwise is like actually just using that idea to try to sell you something, which I've always thought of as like, I don't know, just something that explains these guys sociopathy to themselves. But I'm curious what you think about that aspect of the book.
05:15
Speaker 2
They hate the public and the common good. And so they think everyone else shares this idea. But I think most people don't. A lot of what you run across with this type of ideology, some call it libertarian, anarcho-capitalism, has definitely morphed into fascism, is this idea that none of this works and nobody wants it and we're just going to do something different. But it's simply not true. The system of government we have, as imperfect as it is, comes out of thousands of years of trial and error, all the way back to the Greeks for categorizing what works and what doesn't. And oligarchy and tyranny don't work. You need a society. Silicon Valley was created by the government. None of these people have a right to get out. This is like a gang. You're in it. We paid for you. You're in it for life. You don't get out of this because now you're rich and you don't want to pay taxes and you think you can survive on your own. As a species, we can't survive alone. on our own. Our parents don't just like dump us on the street. We are interdependent. And these guys have a mythology that somehow they did it all themselves when most of them are government welfare kings.
06:15
Speaker 1
So it seems to me and yeah, maybe you'll disagree, but it seems to me that people are very resistant to the idea that these guys genuinely have these beliefs, even though they've like said them out loud a lot of times.
06:29
Speaker 2
What is that?
06:30
Speaker 1
Why do you think people are so resistant to taking these guys at their word?
06:37
Speaker 2
I think there's two parts to that. A, most of the general public hasn't heard this stuff because the mainstream press refuses to talk about it for the most part. Maybe in little dribs or drabs here and there is some oddity on the margins of Silicon Valley societies. What's happened, however, is these ideas have moved into the center of our politics through J.D. Vance, into our political system. Crypto, which very few Americans use and which has no real use case besides crime, gambling, human trafficking, and now political corruption, has become the biggest player in our political system, the biggest donor, with hundreds of millions of dollars on hand for the midterms. Why is that? Why is this little used, weird, scammy product now the biggest monster in the room? Well, when you start asking that question, you get into the same stuff I've been writing about, right? They have an entire ideology behind this stuff. The idea of crypto is that it's going to destroy the government and replace the government. And so I think the media has tried to ignore that. I think on one level, Editors think, well, we're not going to give those stupid ideas any attention. We're not going to give them any oxygen. But that's based on the presumption that newspaper editors and TV editors decide reality. Billionaires have the power now to just impose these ideas through culture, through social media, through politics. And so on one level, it's that. I also think there's an allergy to complicated narratives. And I also think that there's an allergy to ideology. Here we are in, what, the 10th year of Trump. And people still don't understand on a deeper level, why does anybody support Trump? What is it about this scammy billionaire from reality TV that who is clearly not a Christian or a family man, even that appeals to evangelicals?
08:25
Speaker 3
Right.
08:25
Speaker 2
And there are people like George Lakoff and others who have explained the appeal of Trump to the right wing brain. But most of the media coverage is like a dog chasing a ball. the politician or whatever throws a ball, everybody chases it. Everybody kind of tells the same story. So they're not really talking about the more systemic matters. And I just think we have a media that's largely got a model based on superficial stories about what's happening. And the deeper ones get told after the fact, once it's too late.
08:53
Speaker 1
It's a perfect segue to talk about this like control that these guys have built. I think of it almost as like, a parallel media ecosystem that's now surpassed the traditional media ecosystem. And sometimes I'll talk to people and they'll act like it was a mistake or an unintentional consequence of building these platforms that they like eroded the business model for journalism, that they, you know, created a situation where these guys have a lot of control over information flows, all of that stuff. I'm curious to hear what you think about how important that's been to their ability to to kind of have this takeover that like on the one hand, there are all of these problems with how mainstream media covers stuff. But on the other hand, they've built this parallel ecosystem that is now, I would say, more influential than traditional media.
09:52
Speaker 2
That's what they call it, a parallel system, a parallel media, a parallel politics, parallel education is another big point for them. They understand how influence and persuasion work in society. They understand how opinions and brains are shaped by information, by words, by stories, by narratives. And they want to control that. They hate that the media, which they regard as liberal because it's based in truth, reason, and rationality, has so much power. And they seek to destroy that power and replace the press with propaganda that serves their own interests. They're very explicit about that. And look, that's why they're trying to buy up all the channels, CBS, CNN, or creating their own media channels. OpenAI just bought their own podcast, right? Whatever happened. I think that's the last anybody heard of it. And Andreessen Horowitz is going into trying to create its own media. Those things will flop and fail. I don't think most people are really interested in a venture capital's media organ. But you do have some of these podcasts that break out, like the All In podcast, which is just these four right-wing venture capitalists sitting around talking for hours. And so they do have some success. But that's the idea, is to replace the existing establishment– With their own establishment. And because of the way the finances work and the money works, they've had some luck with that. I mean, just last week, the McClatchy newspapers race to work laid off a ton of people. Half the reporters at the Lexington Herald-Leader where I started, the entire editorial board except the editor at the Sacramento Bee where I was the editorial page editor.
11:25
Speaker 1
I mean, every week I feel like there's a new story about mass layoffs at some outlet or another. And, I mean, these guys... They've built a parallel media ecosystem and somehow managed to create it so that they don't have any of the responsibilities or liabilities of traditional publishers, too. So they're not responsible for anything that goes on the platforms. They're not even regulated by the same agencies that regulate other media. It's just a free for all.
11:56
Speaker 2
Influences are typically not journalists. Some are, but most aren't. I saw one very big influencer last year do a whole massively viral thing about how Donald Trump's about to give Peter Thiel, Washington, D.C., the city to run as his own fiefdom. And this is delivered while the person is walking down a street, talking, looking to the camera. None of this is natural or normal. And I have people writing me like, why aren't you writing about this? Because it's not true. Thiel's not in D.C. He doesn't own it. And the person's on to new stuff, right? So you've got to watch out for some of these things because– We're just as susceptible as the MAGA people are to these disinformation stories that confirm our biases or tell us something we want to hear. No, totally.
12:37
Speaker 1
I see it happen all the time. Actually, I keep seeing this thing happen with people involved in various sort of progressive causes or like on the left, right? Where they're like, we should use the same tactics as the right-wing guys to get like our thing out. But they'll often like, I don't know, it's like they... They don't understand that they still need to fact check. They still need to, you know what I mean? It's like, okay, if you don't want to just be part of the larger kind of cluttering of the information ecosystem, it's not helpful for you to create like what this guy did in DC. That kind of stuff is not helpful to people understanding the situation because it just makes them feel like they can't trust anything that they're hearing or seeing anywhere.
13:21
Speaker 2
Yeah, it serves to absurdify things that should be treated seriously.
13:28
Speaker 1
Right.
13:28
Speaker 2
I feel when that viral misinformation went out, it made my job harder because now people think I'm doing that. I'm just telling the scary story, whereas I'm hyperlinked and highly aware of the deep pockets of these guys who could sue me into oblivion.
13:44
Speaker 3
Right.
13:45
Speaker 2
So I have to get the facts straight. I can't slip up. There are people who put stuff out. I'm like, that's not true. The algorithm rewards lies, rewards anger. Rewards outrage. And that's what people are going for. A lot of people. There are some good influencers. There's a lot of great influencers. But some of these people who are trying to straddle the line between who are jumping on the news and pretending to add to it.
14:08
Speaker 1
The news influencers or whatever.
14:10
Speaker 2
News influencers. And there's some good ones of those. But you've got to be aware. You've got to check facts. And if someone is telling you something that you find out is not true, you've got to unfollow.
14:39
Speaker 1
OK, I want to talk about network state you mentioned at the top, but I want to start with sea studying, because as someone who like was in the Bay Area for a really long time, I really have such vivid memories of this.
14:51
Speaker 2
Being like that.
14:53
Speaker 1
A trend in the, you know, kind of early dot com days and and kind of like rolling my eyes at it and thinking it was dorky. And really, it took me quite a while to understand that it was sort of there was like a more nefarious nature underneath. But tell me, what is seasteading?
15:10
Speaker 2
The basic idea of seasteading is that you could escape from democratic governments, laws and regulations by establishing your own territory out in the middle of the ocean. And it was an idea funded by Peter Thiel back in the late 2000s, early 2010s to establish the Seasteading Institute, which would start creating these projects around the world. However, the idea didn't really pan out because nobody really wants to live out in a rusted oil barge in the middle of the ocean or on a ship. It's like being on the cruise from hell. You know, a lot of times these guys don't really understand how people in society work. There's a reason we're in cities like San Francisco and New York or even Austin or whatever. These things have grown over time. These are places people want to be. There's a long history and culture and infrastructure there. And in a way, it's funny. I was just watching Going Clear, the Alex Gibney documentary on Scientology. And, well, L. Ron Hubbard's whole thing was to try to do stuff on boats to escape rules and laws. That's what Sea Org is about. So basically, they didn't even invent anything new with seasteading. It's sort of a Scientology knockoff, and it's sputtered out. But then seasteading becomes an idea to create these things on land instead. So evolving from the ocean to the land, just like any primordial creature would. That's how smart the tech bros are.
16:28
Speaker 1
I want to ask you about that too, because it does frustrate me how much people are still in love with the idea that these guys are geniuses. And I'm like, they're just not. What is so attractive about that idea to people, do you think? So I was a clean tech reporter in San Francisco in the early 2000s, right? So I reported on the early Tesla stuff. And also when there was that whole scandal of like Elon Musk claiming to be the founder, but he wasn't, he was just a late stage investor and like, you know, all of these stories.
16:57
Speaker 2
So like, Very.
16:59
Speaker 1
Early on, he also, I don't know, he's been lying for a long time and his ideas are wacky. He's been talking about the Mars thing forever and it's never made sense, all of that stuff. But every time I would write about it, I would get this like swarm of muskrats being like, you're an idiot and he's a genius and blah, blah, blah. And I still think even now when I think his star has definitely dimmed, For quite a few people, people think of him as this genius. They'll even say things like, I don't really like his politics, but you can't deny that he's really brilliant. I can deny it and I will. So, yeah. What do you think it is that makes people so attached to the idea that these guys are geniuses?
17:44
Speaker 2
There's an old Yiddish saying that captures it well. If you're rich, you're also smart, handsome and can sing. People think that rich people are good at everything and they're not. And then the rich people start thinking they're good at everything because they're egomaniacal. And then everyone's telling them they're good at everything. And then you find out they're not. Do you remember when Elon Musk said that COVID was going to be over by April 2020 and that the panic was dumb? I mean, this guy should have never been listened to again. He's an idiot. And the billionaires are really, really, really dumb about things they don't understand or know about. And there might be a few things that they're really good at, like making money or finding a business opportunity. Some of them have some kind of technical knowledge or skill that contributed something that was valuable in the market. But that doesn't make them good at everything. You know, I'm pretty smart at political analysis. You don't want me to conduct your appendicitis surgery. Right. But I know that I know what I'm good at and what I'm not good at. Now, give me a few billion dollars and I might lose track of that. Right. I might forget what I'm good at or not, because I think we're dealing with an era of billionaire psychosis here. It's really clear that the money toxifies their brains and is resulting in some pretty insane behavior and it's become contagious. Elon Musk was talking about the mind virus he was fighting. He is the damn mind virus. They've all got a mind virus. Everybody knows this is not like it was 10 years ago or 15 years ago when a lot of liberal- climate-conscious people thought Elon Musk was a wonderful hero who was trying to save the world with electric cars. And it turns out people were fooled. This guy was always this kind of percolating problem. And now he's come out fully as a fascist ideologue. I mean, gave a damn Hitler salute at the inauguration. And you're right. All the Tesla drivers we know are rationalizing their choice by saying, well, it's half this and half that. But that's not how it works. You know, you can't be halfway and half not. I mean, I don't understand why anybody's still driving a Tesla or supporting this guy in any way, shape or form.
19:44
Speaker 1
Yeah.
19:45
Speaker 3
Okay.
19:45
Speaker 1
I want to talk about how the Greenland stuff is connected. to network state and why that still seems to be a surprise to people. Like, again, it's been out loud for a while. What does Greenland have to do with network state?
20:03
Speaker 2
At the heart of the network state ideology, which basically proposes that tech billionaires should seize power in the 21st century using technology, is colonialism. The idea of claiming more land, of creating a new frontier, of hogging up and hoarding resources for yourself. Greenland has a lot of different resources, rare earths, other deposits, shipping lanes that might melt with climate change and lucrative new trade routes. And it'll be a nice place to live if the planet heats up, apparently. You know, it'll melt and there'll be green, wonderful, cooler temperatures up there. And so it's this prized piece of land that Trump has had his eye on for quite some time. What's happening now is the tech billionaires are also on this idea. And some of them are backing a project called Praxis, which had proposed to build a new tech city on Greenland. They've been looking at the Mediterranean, the Middle East. They looked in Dominican Republic. I'm not really sure Praxis is a solid proposal anymore. You know, I wrote about that early on and then Reuters did a whole story on it. And like it was real. And you got one of Peter Thiel's deputies as the ambassador to Denmark. And well, you know, so everywhere you look, you see the same group of people kind of lining up to be a part of this. And you're starting to always see as well. the idea for some kind of weird new billionaire-funded city. And that is the network state idea. In fact, they're proposing to build one on the ruins of Gaza. Jared Kushner, Trump's own son-in-law, is pushing that. So there's this idea, this apocalyptic idea, that instead of digging their own personal bunkers, the billionaires have to create new territories that will be designed to protect them and empower them in this terrible future they're creating with technology that Where you won't be able to live in countries like the United States or regular cities anymore. Again, this is an apocalyptic cult. There's no reason to believe that has to be the future. But they seem to have watched Elysium one too many times, and they can't quite build one in space yet. So they're trying to build them here on land. Yeah.
22:16
Speaker 1
I watched this bizarre interview with Dryden Brown, I think his name is, the guy that came up with Praxis, right? And, like, again, I just– every time I see these guys talk, it's– to me how anyone gives them the time of day, let alone millions of dollars. But Peter Thiel did. And he, he talks about this Greenland idea, both as like a training ground for all the people that are going to go move to Mars.
22:42
Speaker 2
Right.
22:42
Speaker 1
Because the like topography and climate of Greenland is like, in his words, as close as we can get to Mars, by the way, not true. And this guy obviously doesn't know what he's talking about, but he's like, Oh yeah, this is how we're going to like prep ourselves to live on Mars and And he's like obsessive about this colonial thing, but also this vision of him and his friends as being like, I don't know, this, this like idea of going back to like when men were men and we were all pioneers and like forging the frontier or whatever. And I'm like, okay, like, um, you live in a house with 20 other dudes and you have like a suit of armor at the door.
23:22
Speaker 3
Yeah.
23:23
Speaker 1
Yeah.
23:27
Speaker 2
Okay, you know what?
23:28
Speaker 1
I'm just going to share some of this video with you so that you can see exactly what I'm talking about.
23:34
Speaker 3
It's very cold there. It's very barren. They don't really have trees. Greenland is very interesting. I mean, I think there aren't many frontiers left on Earth, and there's a particular kind of person that finds that kind of challenge really attractive, right? It's like we have to figure out, you know, Elon's talking about sending Starship to Mars in like a couple of years. We have to figure out how we're going to build a city on Mars. Greenland is the best sort of half-step towards Mars. It's the best sort of training ground for building a Martian society.
24:02
Speaker 1
Okay. I want to talk about J.D. Vance because you have quite a bit about him in the book. I think that there's a lot of people still who are really, really convinced that if we just get rid of Trump, then that solves all of the problems, right? And are not seeing this bigger picture. Or that Vance is so much scarier and worse than... Trump. Whenever I talk to people about this, they'll say like, oh yeah, but he can't get elected because he's so weird and unlikable. And I'm like, it's cute that you think elections are going to still be a thing when all this goes down. But like, you know, this guy is very dangerous. Tell me why we should take him seriously as a threat.
24:46
Speaker 2
No one took Trump seriously either in 2016. It was a big joke. Ha, ha, ha. They're putting Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton. This is over before it starts. A lot of us thought that, right? We didn't see it coming. And so I think we can never, ever again think that someone being awful and unlikable and terrible is an impediment to the presidency. If there's one thing we've learned in the last 10 years, even trying to overthrow the government of the United States— Didn't stop Trump from getting back into power. So we need to wake up to where we really are, y'all. Like we are not in a place where logic and reason are the overriding concerns for a large subset of voters. So Vance is very dangerous. The tech bros, these billionaires will do anything to get him elected because they'll do whatever they want. He's a radical extremist who has quoted the ideas of Curtis Yarbrough, specifically that Donald Trump should purge the government and defy the courts if they try to stop him. This is a guy who's a Harvard trained, a Yale trained lawyer saying the president of the United States should defy the justices of the Supreme Court. If you get this guy in there, he'll go all the way. He'll go full Nazi. He will try his best to make sure we have an emergency that means that he now has full power. He'll finish the job where Trump didn't. Trump seems mostly interested in naps, Natalie, and crypto these days, right? And believe me, I don't discount all the evil and harm that Donald Trump has done. But Vance is a zealot. He's an ideologue and is not obsessed with money. He's obsessed with power. And he is almost entirely a creation of Peter Thiel. At every step of his career, it's been Peter Thiel who made him a venture capitalist instead of a lawyer, who funded his own venture capital firm, even though Vance was not much of a venture capitalist. He made Vance a Catholic, even though Peter Thiel is not a Catholic. He made him a senator. by getting Donald Trump to endorse him, even though Vance had called Trump America's Hitler, and he poured $ 15 million into the race, which changed the whole dynamic. Vance was losing that Senate race until Thiel and Trump jumped in. And then they got him on the vice presidential slot in the 2024 election, where they proceeded to do the whole purge that Vance had said he should do, quoting Curtis Yarvin, by the way. J.D. Vance quoted Curtis Yarvin. So, yeah. And also, Trump's in very bad health. The thing everyone's celebrating, oh, Trump's not going to make it, he's not going to last. That's exactly the kind of dynamic that puts Vance in power. And these billionaires are going to be so scared about the failure of this project that Vance will be incentivized to do his very worst. And they'll probably spend More money than has ever been spent in the history of the world to make this man president. So he should not be underestimated. And he's extremely dangerous.
27:43
Speaker 1
Yeah.
27:43
Speaker 2
Yeah.
27:44
Speaker 1
Can we talk about the Antichrist idea? It's related.
27:49
Speaker 2
It's related. It shows up so much.
27:54
Speaker 1
Yeah, like what is the obsession with the Antichrist? I hadn't known until I read your book that there'd been all this discourse presenting Peter Thiel as the Antichrist almost in like a good way as well. And then he had this whole rant about Greta Thunberg being the Antichrist.
28:12
Speaker 2
Why does this come up so much with these guys? Well, because of Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel's been obsessed with the Antichrist for a while. It's now come to be his defining obsession, I would say. He's literally traveling the earth, giving four-day lectures on the Antichrist. He's done this in Austin, at Harvard, at Oxford, in San Francisco, and outside the gates of the Vatican, and in Austria. And in the Vatican in Austria, the theologian all blasted him and said, this is poppycock. What are you talking about? This is like not theology. It's some kind of do-it-yourself apocalypse. Rhapsody, he's saying. And basically what Thiel's doing in his Antichrist speeches is portraying our current predicament as an existential battle between good and evil. And in his upside-down, backward version of Christianity, which I call anti-Christianity because it focuses on the Antichrist, not on Jesus Christ, like most Christianity focuses on Jesus, is that the tech bros are on the side of God and everyone else who's against them is on the side of the Antichrist. And anybody who tries to stop tech acceleration... toward this maximal AI, eat the world universe is threatening the continuation of humanity. And it goes a lot of places. I mean, I've got a transcript of his San Francisco lectures, and it's very rambling, very strange. It shouldn't take four days to lecture on the Antichrist. And a military industrial complex surveillance government contractor billionaire, the co-founder of Palantir, should probably not be the person telling us about the Antichrist, especially when his very strange and dangerous protege, J.D. Vance, is a heartbeat away from the presidency. Peter, are you trying to tell us something? Blink twice if it's JD Vance. I mean, what is he talking about? I think on the other hand, it's an effort to make the strange ideas coming out of Silicon Valley about the creation of an AI godlike force that's going to give us eternal life and multi-planetary travel and create the super abundance. It's trying to put a Christian mask on those ideas. Right. Because in a way, when you look at what Silicon Valley is promising via AI, it's the Christian eschatology story. The God is coming. God's going to grant us eternal life. And we're going to go into the heavens, the stars, and we're going to have abundance, paradise. I think Teal is trying to meld the two together with a Christian mask to maintain the alliance with the MAGA base of evangelicals. Yeah. Yeah.
30:46
Speaker 1
It's almost like if evangelicals tried to have total control.
30:50
Speaker 2
Over the rapture.
30:50
Speaker 1
It's like we're going to like wait for it, but actually we're going to manufacture it. And then we'll be the ones that know when all this stuff is happening. So we'll benefit from it, too. I don't know. It just seems like a like a weird control fantasy.
31:08
Speaker 2
Peter Thiel's Antichrist sounds a lot like Peter Thiel, or at least like a venture capitalist from Silicon Valley. someone who will travel the world preaching doom and apocalypse, scaring people in order to propose a solution, a technological solution that will be a tricky way for them to gain power over the entire world with a guarantee of peace and safety, right? This is all what Thiel says his Antichrist would be. That's why he tries to point the finger at AOC or Greta Thunberg or anyone who wants to regulate AI. Yeah. it's quickly reversible to say, hey, aren't you talking about yourself? I mean, literally, Palantir is a surveillance technology company that was established after 9-11 to guarantee peace and safety. And so it's weird. I almost think Thiel's doing it on purpose. I think he wants us to ask the question of whether he is the Antichrist. I mean, there's no other reason for him to be so closely associating his name with the Antichrist. You know, even the Catholic Church Doesn't really talk about that stuff anymore because it's too dark. But I think the good thing is that, again, one of those things where apparently no one's telling Peter Thiel, you really shouldn't be talking about the Antichrist right now, dude.
32:16
Speaker 1
These guys have no, no people around them anymore at all.
32:20
Speaker 2
Yeah. He's scaring the hell out of people and waking them up to what's really going on here. And that's why I chose to tell people more about what he's really saying.
32:29
Speaker 1
It's so bizarre. Relatedly, what is it that they hate so much about the, about? The climate movement, climate activists, Greta Thunberg, they have such a bee in their bonnet about it. I don't know if it's just because they think that those people are the most against AI because of the environmental impact of data centers and all that kind of thing or something else.
32:55
Speaker 2
They hate all political philosophies that call for action in the service of the collective good.
33:02
Speaker 1
Yeah.
33:03
Speaker 2
Yeah.
33:04
Speaker 1
Anything that's like not individualistic. Yeah.
33:07
Speaker 2
They should be able to maximize their self-interest, even if it comes at the detriment of everyone else. Even if it destroys the earth, nothing should stand between these capitalists and their profits and their ambitions for power. And some of these people believe, well, we got to become multi-planetary anyway. So this is the thing that will force us to leave earth in order to survive. And The problem with that is that there are no other planets where we can live as far as we know. And it would take thousands and thousands of years to get there. Thousands and thousands of years on a ship probably wouldn't even get very far before we got hit by an asteroid or a rock or lost our oxygen supply. So there's no way that we're all going to get out. Again, this is an apocalyptic fantasy they're living in. But they really cannot see past their own greed and self-interest. And they hate the idea that the continued survival on Earth is will require us to act in the best interests of the majority of people here to save the planet, to stop burning fossil fuels and pursuing destructive economic policies and goals. And so they feel very threatened by this. And this is why they hate democracy, by the way, because democracy gives everybody a vote and they don't want that.
34:20
Speaker 1
Yeah. As in so many other ways. it's like this thing where they think they're doing something really new and it's just like a completely tired old idea. It's like they're, they think they've reinvented colonialism. They're disrupting just bog standard colonialism and like the thing elites have been afraid of since people first started talking about democracy. It's just like the same shit over and over again, except they have like the endless money cheat now.
34:53
Speaker 2
They're also, you know, reviving eugenics and racism and misogyny and apocalyptic millenarian psychosis. It's all, you know, the funny thing is that the guys who claim they're going to take us into the future seem to want to take us into the past more than anything else.
35:12
Speaker 1
Yeah, they really want to go back to like, I don't know. The Industrial Revolution, I guess, would be a perfect time for them. It's very strange.
35:21
Speaker 2
Balaji Sreenivasan actually points to Ida Tarbill as one of the main enemies of progress.
35:29
Speaker 1
The original Antichrist.
35:31
Speaker 2
Yeah. Because of what she did to Rockefeller. And so right there you have this idea that capitalist power should be unmitigated. And anyone who stands in the way of that, like an investigative journalist, is bad. And no, she died in like 1941. And he's still mad about her. He has written about this quite a few times about Ida Tarbell and what she did to Standard Oil. And it's pretty amazing. They tell you exactly who they are by choosing who the heroes and villains are. And they're villains who think they're heroes. That's a big part of their mythology.
36:03
Speaker 1
Yeah. I have to show you that I have an Ida Tarbell tattoo right here.
36:08
Speaker 2
Oh, wow.
36:15
Speaker 1
The spill is a regularly recurring segment of the drilled podcast it comes out every friday when we're not in the middle of a narrative season if you have ideas for folks you'd like to see us interview on here let us know we're at drilled media on all social media platforms or you can email me at amy at drill.media links to all the stories we mentioned and to pre-order my book are in the show notes The Spill is produced by Peter Duff. Our theme song is Bird in the Hand by Fournone. Artwork by Matthew Fleming. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton. of the First Amendment Project. You can find transcripts of The Spill online at drilled.media. Like the rest of Drilled, The Spill is distributed by Pushkin Industries. The team there is Eric Sandler, Grace Ross, Morgan Ratner, Owen Miller, Kira Posey, Jordan McMillan, Brian Shreberneck, and Jake Flanagan.
37:19
Speaker 2
Thank you.
The Host
