“The Nerd Reich” is the book Silicon Valley elites don’t want you to read. Here’s what the author has to say.

I spoke to the journalist Gil Durán about his new book, which sheds light on what the tech fascists behind Trump are planning.

Tlaloc, the French bulldog of journalist Jean Guerrero, poses with Gil Durán’s book.

Some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley dream of a dystopia: one in which democracies are dead and CEOs rule over the rest of us. A few of them muse openly about this. Yet their plans have received little attention in the mainstream media. Now, a new book is dragging them into the light.

In The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, the journalist Gil Durán, a grandson of Mexican immigrant farmworkers, traces a line from obscure philosophers and anti-human subcultures to Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Donald Trump and JD Vance. He shows how the darkest fantasies of aggrieved, antisocial nerds came to serve as the blueprint for Trump’s second term.

I interviewed Durán as the guest host of “The Nerd Reich” show on YouTube, amid a campaign to ban him from the platform. We talked about Thiel’s influence on JD Vance, how immigrants are a testing ground for tech fascism, how technology is becoming a religion, and more — including how people can fight back. “We have to find a way to envision a world without billionaires, because the billionaires are envisioning a world without us,” Durán told me.

Below is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity. The episode was produced, edited and announced by R.R. Robbins.

JEAN GUERRERO

Thank you for sitting in the guest chair with me today and letting me talk about the book with you.

GIL DURÁN

Thanks for hosting.

JEAN GUERRERO

As soon as I heard this book was coming, I reached out to ask for an early copy. I’ve been following the tech fascists for a while, but I’ve never seen anyone so succinctly capture what they’re trying to do. I read it in one sitting and instantly recognized it as one of the most important books of our time. You trace how the tech elites are openly plotting to destroy democracy here and across the world. So much of the political discourse on the left is focused on the evils of Trump. But people have to realize that Trump is not the main villain. As you observe, he’s a tool of the tech fascists. So for people who are new to all of this, can you talk a little bit about what he is a tool for?

GIL DURÁN

Donald Trump is a tool for disrupting democracy. And he’s been that way for over 10 years. He sort of came off of Twitter, using the algorithms of social media to become more powerful than any other political figure in the country and to some degree in the world. If you think about what happened before Twitter, Trump had run for president before and he had flirted with the idea, and he gained no traction because the media, the Beltway media, still had sway over who would be taken seriously and who wouldn’t. Social media disrupted that, and Trump was an early adopter.

Some people might say that because of those algorithms, he’s the first AI president.

And so when Trump returns to power in 2024 ... the first time around there were people in tech who opposed Trump. There was something called Tech Against Trump. A lot of these companies made visible efforts to oppose his agenda of deportations and brutality and racism and terror. This time around it’s very different. What’s different about it is that a lot of these billionaires have aligned behind Trump. They have decided that instead of opposing this disruptive, democracy-destroying technology, they’re going to invest in it. Because what do venture capitalists do?

They invest in disruptive technologies, and Donald Trump is a technology for destroying democracy.

JEAN GUERRERO

There is a further alignment between him and the tech fascists, in that they’re all influenced by eugenics, by this idea of a genetic hierarchy. Many of them believe that there are certain people who are superior, specifically the rich and the powerful, often the white, and that they’re the ones who should inherit the world.

Can you talk about this relationship you explore in the book between tech fascism and eugenics, this desire to breed a kind of master race of humanity?

GIL DURÁN

White supremacy is Donald Trump’s superpower. That’s what he really tapped into to get his core base revved up. This idea that white people are under threat from the rising demographic tide of people of color who will become a majority of the country in this century. He’s been able to create this cult of grievance that sees itself as the ultimate victim of society, and he promises them a return to greatness, if only they can purge their hated enemies and return to their former status of glory, which obviously is a myth and never really existed. What Trump shares with the tech right wing is this idea that they are superior.

I’ve done a lot of work over the years with George Lakoff, the cognitive scientist, who I feel did the best job of categorizing how politics really works, and I haven’t really found his method to have any flaws. If you look at what right wing thought revolves around, it’s a hierarchy, a very systematic hierarchy that is considered the moral order of the world. And the hierarchy is God over man, men over women, whites over non-whites, Western cultures over non-Western cultures, Christianity over other religions, rich over poor, strong over the weak, straight over the LGBTQ, and on and on and on.

They see that there has to be this hierarchy enforced in the world or the moral order is out of balance. Make America Great Again is a classic fascist movement because it seeks to restore that hierarchy by demonizing and purging its opponents. And the tech right very much shares this idea.

If you look at Silicon Valley venture capitalists and billionaires, it’s all white men. White men who have been treated as geniuses for much of their lives.

Mostly because of their ability to make money, occasionally because they have some kind of technical knowledge that has unlocked some sort of product that’s useful. But they’re taking that to the extreme degree of now thinking that they should be the rulers of the earth, not just of the boardroom or of their companies. Their idea seems to be that they are the best, the smartest, the wealthiest, the most powerful, and that they should be the rulers of the earth.

And it didn’t take very long for this kind of thinking to merge with basic off-the-shelf white supremacist thinking. That’s how you get Elon Musk, who formerly seemed like this sort of humble, self-effacing, quasi-liberal guy who wanted to save the world from climate change with electric vehicles, into the white supremacist in chief, using the social media platform he bought to foment racial strife and polarization and hatred all over the world. They view themselves as cognitive elites. What we’re seeing here is an effort by this handful of very wealthy people to seize power and control the future.

JEAN GUERRERO

Nerds who are supposed to be, you know, brilliant. But these ideas are based on pseudoscience, on this fundamental misunderstanding of Darwin’s ideas of evolution and this whole notion of the survival of the fittest, where they think that the most violent, the most powerful are those who are worthy to survive, when in fact nature shows that so much of fitness is about collaboration and cooperation within species.

But what’s interesting is also that Trump has long posed as a nationalist, as a guy who wants to, quote, make America great again. As you show in your book, the tech elites who are behind him are publicly conspiring to accelerate the decline of nation states, including the United States. They do not believe in borders or nations, and in fact are in the process of violating the sovereignty of nations across the world. So how does an alleged nationalist like Trump, who used to claim to hate globalist elites, come to be so helpful to these transnational elites? You talk about this marriage between Silicon Valley and the Trump family. Tell us a little bit about that.

GIL DURÁN

Trump’s beliefs and morals are extremely flexible based on who’s paying him. So he played to this sort of nationalist, overwrought American eagle with long talons, Trump as muscular Uncle Sam image, when that was to his benefit with the MAGA base early on. We’re seeing a very different Trump in this term.

First of all, everything about MAGA and Trump now is an assault on American values and American ideals. The entire basis of our system of government is under attack from these people. In addition, one of the key planks of American power in the world for the past century or so has been our foreign policy of being involved in other countries, of being a world superpower. Donald Trump has really worked hard to erode that, to withdraw the United States from its role on the global stage and to pretty much make us a laughing stock … a joke with nuclear weapons.

What we are, in essence, right now, is a crypto banana republic. Donald Trump, who once called crypto a scam (for many years he was after crypto, insulting crypto as fake and a scam against the dollar, that’s a direct quote), became a crypto billionaire on the day he returned to office. And now he’s the crypto bro in chief.

Unsurprisingly, his stance on American power in the world has also changed. So he is trying to withdraw American power and allow basically Russia and China to fill the gap. Trump is actively weakening the United States. If you look at that through the crypto lens, crypto is essentially a tool for undermining government authority. The entire prophecy of crypto is that it will replace the dollar. And not only will it replace the monetary power the United States has, it will also replace and undermine the political power of the United States.

So since shifting over to crypto billionaire, Trump is a lot more aligned with this idea that the United States has had its day and must now decline into just one little sliver of the world that it bullies and controls, while letting our geopolitical adversaries fill in the gap and take over. This is a thing called multipolarity. It’s very much favored by Russia and Saudi Arabia and North Korea and China. And now it’s also favored by the president of the United States.

JEAN GUERRERO

In the book, you dive into the central role that Peter Thiel plays in all of this, in the spread of tech fascism. Thiel, for those who don’t know, is one of the most powerful men in the world, who co-founded the surveillance company Palantir, and PayPal as well. He’s someone who, when asked in an interview if the human species should survive, hesitated for a long time and had a hard time answering the question. So can you tell us about the role of Peter Thiel in the spread of tech fascism, and the world that he is trying to build.

GIL DURÁN

Well, he hesitated for eighteen seconds, and I know that because I counted it twice just to make sure. He stammered and finally said yes, but it wasn’t a convincing yes that the human race should survive.

Peter Thiel is a tech billionaire who was born in Germany and spent part of his childhood in Namibia and South Africa before spending the rest of his teenage years in California, just south of San Francisco. He went to Stanford and he got a degree in philosophy and a degree in law. But he was a mediocre lawyer. Then he went to hedge funds and he was a mediocre hedge fund guy. But he found more luck in Silicon Valley. He was in the right place at the right time. Everything was just about to explode in Silicon Valley. And Thiel, by hanging around Stanford after he had graduated already, was able to come into contact with some people who would go on to become very successful in tech. As an investor, he reaped the benefits of that.

People don’t realize that Thiel’s not a technology guy. He’s not a coder, he’s not a computer guy. He’s a lawyer, a wannabe philosopher, and an investor.

In nineteen ninety-seven, Peter Thiel read a book called The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State. This was an apocalyptic, strange book that predicted that in the 21st century, technology would undermine and collapse democratic nations like the United States and the UK. The two technologies in particular that would do this would be something called cybercurrency, which we would call crypto, this new form of digital money that would undermine government authority and allow wealthy people to exfiltrate their money from the system without detection. The other was advanced automation, which we would today call AI, which was going to replace most workers and lead to an eventual economic collapse that would result in chaos and violence.

And the proper role for the so-called sovereign individuals, the heroes of this kooky, crazy, apocalyptic book, would be to gather up multiple passports and travel to different countries that would now desperately cater to the needs of these wealthy individuals. That would be the New World Order, these sovereign individuals roaming the earth as everything else collapsed. Thiel saw it as a work of prophecy.

JEAN GUERRERO

And he was excited about this.

GIL DURÁN

He has said that it helped inspire his decision to co-found PayPal as an effort to get ahead of this digital currency that was supposedly prophesied. Now it’s important to say that dumb people in Silicon Valley think that The Sovereign Individual predicted crypto. That’s not the case. The idea of some kind of cryptocurrency was floating around for decades before this. What the authors of The Sovereign Individual did was scrape together a bunch of futurist ideas into this kooky, dark, apocalyptic thesis. So there’s nothing intellectual or academic or solid about the book. It’s just a really distressing and destructive prophecy. But when this book was reissued in twenty twenty, Peter Thiel, now a billionaire, wrote the foreword. And if you look back at the last few decades, he has spent a lot of time trying to make this a self-fulfilling prophecy and pursuing the dystopian dream of the sovereign individual.

JEAN GUERRERO

And he believes fundamentally, or seems to believe, in unregulated technological expansion, no matter the cost. But tell us about Thiel’s relationship with JD Vance, because I think that really illustrates how deeply Silicon Valley has infiltrated our politics.

GIL DURÁN

Yeah, that’s probably the most disturbing part of all this.

JEAN GUERRERO

I agree.

GIL DURÁN

It’s not a secret that [Vance] and Thiel have a relationship. Vance recently wrote a memoir, his second one, called Communion, about his religious conversion. And the book largely erased Peter Thiel’s role in his life. This is a book that covers him going from being a lawyer in law school to becoming vice president of the United States.

And strangely, he doesn’t mention the fact that it was Peter Thiel who convinced him not to be a lawyer, and instead to go to Silicon Valley and become a venture capitalist. That he became a venture capitalist at Mithril Capital, which was co-founded by Peter Thiel. He was a mediocre venture capitalist, and when he went back to Ohio to do his own thing and start a venture fund, it was with millions of dollars from Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. When he decided to run for Senate, it was with fifteen million dollars from Thiel, which set a record as the largest amount of money any individual had ever spent in a Senate race. And then when he decided to become vice president, it was Thiel who made the peace between Vance and Trump, who played a role in bridging this gap, because Vance had previously been a Never Trump guy and had called Trump America’s Hitler and cultural heroin. They make the peace and Vance becomes the vice president of the United States.

I mentioned Vance’s memoir because he does say in the book that Peter Thiel played the key role in his conversion to Catholicism. It was the ideas of Thiel that inspired Vance, an atheist, to convert to Catholicism, even though, by the way, Peter Thiel’s not a Catholic. And he couldn’t hide that, because in his previous essays he’d written about his conversion, he gave credit to Thiel.

So here’s a guy who became a venture capitalist, a Catholic, and a politician, with the backing of one man, Peter Thiel. That’s why I say that JD Vance is essentially a creation of Thiel.

And now he’s one heartbeat away from the presidency, and that’s distressing, because he shares a lot of these very dangerous extremist ideas.

JEAN GUERRERO

That’s extremely distressing. I mean, considering that these people seem to want to accelerate the evolution of humanity in a way where it might mean the death of so many people. And they have no qualms about this, and seem to have qualms only with the idea of morality and compassion.

I want to talk a little bit about the war on immigrants, because it has been ground zero for the development of tech fascism in many ways. They’ve been using the border as a testing ground for their dystopian technologies for some time now. We’ve seen how the border has been invading the US under Trump 2.0, with Border Patrol agents operating deep inside the country and shooting people dead in the streets, citizens and non-citizens alike. This thing that was supposed to be targeting immigrants has started to seep into the everyday lives of so many Americans. Immigrant rights activists have for years warned about how the war on immigrants was a Trojan horse for a war on civil rights and the rights of all people in this country. Can you talk about how the Nerd Reich, as you describe it, has taken advantage of Trump’s war on immigrants as a kind of Trojan horse for their agenda.

GIL DURÁN

Earlier, when I was talking about The Sovereign Individual, I mentioned that the other word for the sovereign individuals was cognitive elites. That term, cognitive elite, came from a 1994 book called The Bell Curve, which was a very controversial book that argued essentially that whites were more intelligent than everyone else. The very idea of this new tech sovereignty rising out of Silicon Valley, it has deep semantic roots, even with this idea of eugenics and white supremacy.

The tech fascists see the immigration issue as something they can exploit for power and to create fear. They certainly know that the people making the DoorDash deliveries and driving the Ubers and Lyfts are immigrants. They certainly understand that our entire economy is dependent on immigrant labor. But this is one of the tools they can use to create fear. And remember, they’re in this strange alliance with the MAGA movement. Donald Trump has made hatred of immigrants, specifically Haitians and Latinos, one of the key parts of his entire fascist program.

Every president does deportations. What’s different about this is that it’s an overt terror campaign as well. They’re doing it in the most violent and distressing and scary way possible, to send the message that this is the way things work now. These armed, masked goons doing these crimes in the open, killing people, immigrants and non-immigrants alike. And while immigrants are bearing the brunt of that, it’s a message to all of us that this is now possible, that this is what can happen. The lists tend to get longer and longer under fascism of who can be targeted.

We are seeing immigration as a testing ground, the use of surveillance, the use of brutal tactics. Now they’re unleashing these electrocution gloves. It’s sort of the Guernica, the village where the fascists tested out their weapons during the Spanish Civil War.

They’re using immigrants as guinea pigs for the fascist future they have in mind for the rest of us.

Since you do not see any Silicon Valley billionaires, even the ones who are supposed to be the good ones, speaking out against this. I think that’s the biggest sign. There are some people like, well, Apple and Tim Cook are not, or Google’s not, or this. But where are all the billionaires speaking out against these horrors? As they were, by the way, during the first Trump administration. Something changed.

Maybe people are a little more afraid now. But maybe people are a little more fascist now, and open to being a part of this as long as it wins. So Latinos and immigrants are the canaries in the coal mine. I’ve had some clashes with some people who’ve said, well, it’s not really fascism because we don’t have a paramilitary force on the streets enforcing the terror. I’m like, well, maybe we’re just in the future, but Latinos definitely have that. Immigrants definitely have that. We’re living in fascism, and fascism is coming for everyone else as well.

JEAN GUERRERO

Exactly. And I really don’t think it’s an accident that you were the person who wrote this book, Gil. As a son of Mexican immigrant farm workers, it makes sense to me why you would be able to see what’s going on before a lot of people. So can you talk about how your background influenced your decision to pursue this project, and your ability to connect the dots?

GIL DURÁN

Without a doubt. Growing up poor, growing up Latino. I’ve been able to largely escape the challenges of my background, but I’ve never forgotten where I come from.

When I returned to journalism, I did so largely because I felt I wanted to do something meaningful, something more in public service. I was tired of being in government and politics and that whole game, which is a rat race that can be very unhealthy in some ways, and you never quite end up doing the things you set out to do, because politics dictates that you do all of these other things and you can find yourself far afield of where you thought you were heading when you got into the political game. But I went back to journalism because I felt like I could be of use to the public more.

I was always looking for ways to write about the struggles of regular people. Before this all popped up, I was writing about the plight of homeless people in the pandemic, writing about injustices in the Capitol, where powerful forces were able to defeat the public good by spreading their money around. I was always looking to pick a fight with the big bullies. And I never expected a situation quite like this to emerge. This is sort of a nightmare scenario. And actually, while it’s exciting to have a book that’s getting so much buzz, it’s also very distressing to me that the only reason I’m successful is because we’ve been taken over by a fascist regime. Without that, I’d probably have drifted out of journalism by now and be doing something else for a lot more money.

I don’t think I had any other choice. I felt like I was uniquely able to see it, not only because of my background as a Latino, as someone working class, but also as someone who had so much experience in politics, not only in the tactics and strategies but in the theory that I studied with George Lakoff. I felt like I was able to see the emerging extremism of Silicon Valley, where we were headed. I think that’s why I caught the signal early. So in a very strange way, it all added up.

But I’ve been thinking a lot too about my grandfather, who has been gone now twenty five years. He always felt I was gonna be a writer and always felt I was gonna do something important, even when I was a little boy and it didn’t make any sense to say that. And I guess we’re finding out that he was right.

JEAN GUERRERO

That’s really sweet. And the thing is, it starts with immigrants, as you’ve shown and as you’ve experienced. But at the end of the day, they’re not going to restrict themselves to immigrant communities, to Latino communities. These are just the guinea pigs, the canaries in the coal mine, as you say. But they believe that so many people are genetically inferior to them. I would say the vast majority of humanity, in the minds of so many of these billionaires whose stories you tell in this book.

One thing that struck me while I was reading is that there were so many interesting parallels between the origin stories of some of the characters in The Nerd Reich and the origin story of Stephen Miller, who I wrote my book Hatemonger about, who was Trump’s immigration policy architect. He, just like Curtis Yarvin, Balaji Srinivasan, and other individuals who you delve into, they’re all these antisocial, aggrieved people early in their lives. Why do you think tech fascism appeals to people with those kinds of backgrounds? And also, why do you think Peter Thiel seems to see people like that as allies? He seems to gravitate to those aggrieved antisocial nerds.

GIL DURÁN

Well, birds of a feather flock together. Dime con quién andas. That’s kinda how the world works. It’s their affinity group.

My theory is that to some degree, these are guys who just didn’t mature like normal people. Though they consider themselves genetically superior, they are emotionally inferior, psychologically inferior.

A lot of us don’t fit in at some point in our lives. A lot of us deal with things like bullying. I certainly did. But at a certain point in life you overcome that, and you don’t make it your bitter mission for the rest of your life to get revenge on everybody and to keep that chip on your shoulder. You gotta let it go at a certain point and try to do better, and make sure you don’t do that kind of thing to other people, maybe.

What’s amazing about a lot of these guys, though, is that not only have they overcome whatever challenges or awkwardness they had growing up, but they have become some of the most successful and powerful people in society, if not in the world.

JEAN GUERRERO

Exactly.

GIL DURÁN

And so rather than realize, hey, I can let that go and try to be a better person, they regress into this sort of revenge mentality, seeking revenge on the entire world because they were not celebrated or accepted when they were at a younger phase of their lives.

I think that’s one of the things that is most shocking about what’s happening. We’re being betrayed by the most successful people in our society, the people who have benefited the most, not only from capitalism but from the public investment we made.

Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are federal welfare kings. They would be nowhere without the money that the government invested in the public infrastructure that was the basis for their fortunes.

And I think it’s important to realize that this idea that they are the victims and deserve their vengeance is an important part of fascism. Remember, fascism is always a cult of grievance, where you claim to be the victim of others in order to justify your victimization of others. I would also point out that while we’re going after immigrants and demonizing immigrants, the men playing the key role in this destruction of our country are immigrants as well. And they’re the immigrants we should be deporting. Not the people doing the work to make this country better, but those who hate our values despite benefiting more than anyone from everything that our forefathers and foremothers built in this country.

JEAN GUERRERO

Yeah. And Elon Musk is a really interesting case study in this because, as you pointed out, he owes his wealth to government contracts, and at the same time he’s spewing hatred against the government. He seems to despise everything that made him who he is, including his body. He’s talked about how humans need to ditch our bodies, which he describes as sacks of meat, become robots. But some of the most cutting edge science on consciousness shows that consciousness is deeply rooted in biological bodies and is in fact inseparable from them, that it arises from this meat that Elon Musk so despises. And yet they are so convinced that they can upload their minds, their souls, their identities into computers.

I bring this up because I’m concerned that as crazy as those ideas sound to most people, there are a lot of people who find them seductive. In particular, I’m worried about their ideas resonating with marginalized communities who have a history of corporate exploitation and oppression, and this desire to transcend that condition. I know as a younger woman myself, I fantasized about eternal life as an algorithm. I found these kinds of ideas, these transhumanist ideas, seductive. So how do you reckon with this fact that while on the one hand their ideas sound crazy, there are people who find them seductive.

GIL DURÁN

Religion is always seductive. That’s why it’s still around after thousands of years. Technology is extremely seductive as well.

And what they’re creating really is a religion of technology. If you think about it, it maps onto all the same elements as Christianity. Some kind of savior or God, in the form of AI or some other kind of technological miracle, that’s going to allow us to transcend our humanity and become eternal beings who don’t have to die, and go off into heaven, the planets, traveling and becoming multiplanetary and eternal, thereby enjoying this mystical superabundance that will be provided for us, a kind of posthuman paradise where we will all be surrounded by riches and extreme wealth and never want for anything. Heaven. It’s a literal religious trip.

Dr. Émile Torres and Dr. Timnit Gebru call this TESCREAL: transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism. A lot of words that basically add up to tech’s new AI-based religious ideas.

JEAN GUERRERO

Exactly.

GIL DURÁN

And I think that religious element is important, because it’s key to understand that the reason these guys want to get rid of democracy and law and regulation is not just to get richer.

Many of them believe that this is necessary to unleash this tech acceleration that will deliver the creation of a thermodynamic God that will bring with it eternal life and multiplanetary travel and cyborg oneness, the singularity, et cetera. And so there at the heart of this cult is a very religious idea animating it, much like Al-Qaeda was animated by a vision of the creation of a new world that would arise after the destruction of the United States, and an apocalyptic war that they would set off with the attacks on 9/11.

I think it’s important to keep an eye on that religious aspect, because the reason they’ve become so interested in religion, the other part of it, as you definitely know, Peter Thiel has been traveling the world preaching about the Antichrist for the past couple of years, putting a Christian mask on these tech religious ideas. And the key here is that he sees religion as an important technology for controlling and inspiring the behavior of human beings.

It’s not enough to believe in a product or a material ambition. You have to have a totalizing belief that makes you commit to a movement. Religion is a technology for doing that, for marshalling human behavior into one unified body.

JEAN GUERRERO

Right. But in their vision, it’s not everyone who subscribes to these ideas who’s gonna be able to become this transhuman, this superhuman. It’s them. They want the cognitive elites to get this world.

I think a good demonstration of that is Próspera in Honduras, because I wanted to ask you about network states, which you explore in the book. You explore this idea of network states, which they piloted in many places, but including in Honduras on the island of Roatán, this startup city called Próspera, which the Honduran Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional. I wrote last year about how Trump interfered in the Honduras election to save Próspera by reinstating a party that’s known for its corruption and its ties to violent drug cartels. I interviewed people in Honduras who are fighting displacement by this project that was backed by Peter Thiel, which is now also threatening to bankrupt the country, as you pointed out, because of a lawsuit by these tech elites.

This is something that they want to bring to the United States in the form of what they call Freedom Cities. And essentially what they are, are these corporate run cities, where they create the law and they can do whatever they want. But tell me a little bit more about this idea of a network state and where it comes from, and how the Freedom City is tied to this idea of the network state.

GIL DURÁN

The network state is this cult idea founded by Balaji Srinivasan, who’s a protégé of Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel invested in his first company, they became close, and Peter Thiel turned Srinivasan on to The Sovereign Individual book.

The idea of the network state is that democracies are going to collapse in the 21st century. Sounds familiar by now, right? And that they will be replaced by these corporate territories or kingdoms or fiefdoms called network states, where basically corporations will found their own nations. Instead of being a citizen of the country, you’ll be a consumer who can pick among different countries if you have the income and the ability to belong to one of these things. Otherwise you’ll be out there in the chaotic, violent wasteland, the no person’s land where you will belong if you can’t afford a network state.

The important thing to understand about Balaji Srinivasan’s network state idea is that he got it from Curtis Yarvin, who’s another tech fascist philosopher, another Peter Thiel friend who Peter Thiel funded, sort of Peter Thiel’s political alter ego or guru. Yarvin called the idea patchwork. Yarvin advocates replacing democracy with dictatorship, and he had written that the United States should be replaced with a patchwork of territories, basically corporate authoritarian territories that could even kill their citizens for no reason, and where everybody would be under constant surveillance. What Srinivasan did was try to update this into a more startup-friendly idea that you could wear a suit and talk about in public.

JEAN GUERRERO

Digestible.

GIL DURÁN

More digestible. More cleaned up. He cleansed it of the Yarvinism, though later he would dirty it again with these extremist ideas.

And what’s important about the network state is that there is a venture capital fund, Pronomos Capital, that exists to fund these things around the world. All around the world right now, you’re seeing this idea of billionaire-funded new cities pop up. There’s Próspera in Honduras, which has its own regulatory statutes and where they allow all these experimental therapies that are not allowed in other countries. There’s an idea to build-

JEAN GUERRERO

Longevity therapy.

GIL DURÁN

Longevity therapy, so it kind of reconnects back to this desire to live forever. There’s a proposal to build one in Greenland if Trump is able to steal Greenland from Denmark. There’s a proposal to build a new billionaire tech utopia, dystopia city in the ruins of Gaza. Other billionaires have proposed building them in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Venezuela. There’s one supposedly underway right now in Northern California, California Forever. They deny they’re a network state project, but Balaji Srinivasan himself said that they are, and one of their funders is Marc Andreessen, who’s a central figure along with Thiel in all of these ideas.

The most interesting thing, though, is that in his 2024 campaign, Trump proposed an idea to build 10 new Freedom Cities on federal land, and said it would be a competition. Sort of a reality TV competition for corporations to pitch their new cities, and then he would choose 10 and they would get federal land on which to build. The interesting thing about the Freedom Cities is that though it was reported on in a very superficial way, Politico and others reported that Trump has this idea for Freedom Cities. To this day, no one has said, what is a Freedom City? Why do we need new Freedom Cities instead of investing in existing cities? And where does the idea come from? Well, that idea comes from the network state.

There’s a whole lobbying effort in Washington to get these things built. It’s not clear if Trump’s gonna follow through on building the USA Freedom Cities. He hasn’t mentioned it in a while and he’s running out of time to get these things started. But many people consider this a very serious effort and idea. So keep an eye out for all these weird billionaire funded cities that suddenly need to pop up everywhere.

There’s nothing more expensive than building a city from scratch. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, if your only goal is housing or jobs, to build an entire city from scratch that has no roads, no infrastructure, no water pipes. That’s very, very, very weird. People sometimes say it sounds conspiratorial to say these things are weird network state cities. I think it sounds conspiratorial to say that billionaires are so dumb they don’t know how real estate works. Clearly there’s something wrong with these projects. They don’t make any sense in a classic real estate sense.

JEAN GUERRERO

Right. And you mentioned Curtis Yarvin, so I wanna return to him, because he has this whole idea of the Dark Enlightenment, which you delve into in the book, and he talks about how certain races are more suitable for slavery, all kinds of horrible ideas that Srinivasan made a little bit more palatable. But we saw Curtis Yarvin having an impact already in Trump’s second term in terms of DOGE. Can you talk about how that was connected to some of his proposals? Just DOGE and how that came about.

GIL DURÁN

That’s a great question, because I think it points exactly to why I wrote my book and why I consider this stuff so important. While I was working on this over the past few years, I could feel sometimes a bit of judgment from my peers in journalism, who wondered why I was going so far down this rabbit hole. DOGE is one of the examples I think I can point to of why this mattered.

Curtis Yarvin for many years seemed like this obscure, eccentric racist troll online. Some people didn’t understand, why is this guy important? Why should anybody listen to what he says?

The importance of Curtis Yarvin is that he’s very, very important to powerful billionaires like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen and others. We may consider him stupid, idiotic, et cetera, but they consider him a genius.

In the late 2000s, he wrote that a future president, acting more like a dictator than a president, should conduct a massive purge of the federal government in order to eliminate basically the believers in liberal democracy, and install a regime where every member of the civil service would answer to the president and follow whatever dictates this president handed down. As part of that idea, Yarvin suggested also destroying the United States’s diplomatic status around the world and eliminating international aid programs. In 2012, he did a new version of this idea, which he called RAGE, Retire All Government Employees, suggesting that the federal bureaucracy should be purged by this future dictatorial president. And in 2022, he updated it again to say that if Trump returned to power in 2024, he should install a CEO to act as a dictator and purge the federal government.

And that’s exactly what happened when Trump got re-elected. He immediately announced the creation of DOGE and put Elon Musk, CEO of several companies, in charge of it. And the first thing they did was set about purging the federal government, firing hundreds of thousands of workers, and slashing aid programs like USAID, which according to studies will result in the death of millions of people, many of them children.

So these crazy, kooky ideas, written by a racist troll who spent much of his youth abusing psychedelic drugs and then writing a fantasy version of 21st century fascism while living off of his wife and his mother — this is someone we should have never heard of again. No one should even know his name. But when a billionaire decides you’re important, they have the power to make your crazy ideas into reality.

That’s one of the things we’ve seen happen. And actually the Washington Post did a story about DOGE’s connection to Yarvin, that DOGE was inspired by Yarvin, in April of 2025. That was one of those moments, I think, when people saw that this crazy stuff Gil’s been talking about for a few years was kind of important after all.

JEAN GUERRERO

Yeah. And for a crazy conspiracy theorist, Gil, it seems like you’ve ruffled some of the feathers of these people in Silicon Valley, because you have been repeatedly banned from social media platforms, and I guess also most recently YouTube. To me, that’s evidence that these tech fascists are afraid of your book and the truth that you are exposing. What has that been like?

GIL DURÁN

Well, it’s not a theory if it’s on the record. A lot of my book is told in their words, and I think that’s what they’re afraid of. I’ve often wondered why they say so much of this stuff out loud. They write it down. They want people to know. I think part of the rationale there is that they’re trying to evangelize. They’re trying to create a movement and pull in other people.

JEAN GUERRERO

Yes.

GIL DURÁN

And on some level they understand that the things they say are so extreme that the Washington establishment media is gonna ignore that stuff, is not gonna take it seriously. And so in a way, the radical nature of the ideas is a cloak that protects them from scrutiny. Until now.

It’s funny, because in April of 2024 I wrote a piece on Balaji Srinivasan and I uncovered some of the craziest things he said in these six hour long podcast interviews he does. He gave one where he called his idea tech Zionism, and spelled out this whole idea for the Red Tribe, Republicans, to make war against the Blue Tribe, the Democrats, by partnering with the Gray Tribe, this new tech power that was going to rise up. And then they would purge the Democrats and they would wear gray uniforms with corporate logos, all this crazy stuff. He said they’d have a gray pride parade with drones flying overhead. He unleashed this really bizarre fantasy. And I wrote it all down. It was verbatim, word for word. I had the hyperlinks to the video, time-stamped sections.

Srinivasan went insane for like two days, denying that this was true, saying I was making it all up, saying it was fabulism. And literally there was never a correction on my story. It was unimpeachable that I had the facts there. But I think he was embarrassed to find out how he sounded to a sane person. Because these guys are so wealthy that wherever they go, on these silly fascist podcasts, in rooms with young people who are hoping to get an investment or be a big deal in Silicon Valley someday, I think people just nod along and no one tells you that you’re stupid or you sound crazy. And so to actually come up against somebody who could very succinctly and incisively show everybody how crazy you are, he couldn’t really handle that. I got all kinds of weird threats, and for two days I was just under assault on social media. Then it all went away and quieted down. And he has since then had a policy of never responding to anything that I do.

The only response I’ve had in the past few years has been Elon Musk banning me from Twitter, first when he first bought the platform, for eight months. Then last year Meta wouldn’t allow links to my newsletter to be put on Facebook. When I reached out to customer service about it, it was the weirdest thing, because the guy straight up told me that it was because I write about the network state and I criticize tech figures, and so this was being flagged as controversial. And I’m so thankful, Ray, that you were honest about that, because it blew my mind.

I thought surely, people kept telling me they couldn’t post links, and I thought, maybe I’ve got something wrong with my website. I have to configure something differently, because I had kind of set it up myself and had had a few problems. And no, here comes Ray from Meta customer support to tell me that it’s because of what I write about. Once that got some media attention, Meta backed off. And you can’t really post links on Meta anyway, they throttle links. So you have to find other creative ways to share things there.

In April on four twenty I was permanently banned from Twitter for posting about Palantir’s manifesto, which I referred to as fascist. It was surprising even to me. People assured me it was probably just a mass reporting thing that triggered the algorithm, and if you appeal it, they’re gonna lift it. I appealed it twice. No luck, I’m permanently banned. And I think it’s really clear why. By the way, I wasn’t even a big deal on X. I had 30,000 followers. I’d occasionally have a viral tweet. But increasingly lately my audience was getting bigger as my book came nearer. And suddenly, boom, I’m not there. If you look at X, there’s very little discussion of my book, which is being talked about on other platforms. They kind of did a good job of making sure I’m not a player on X, which is fine with me, by the way.

And now YouTube. This may very well be our last episode of the Nerd Reich podcast, because YouTube has announced they’re gonna disable our channel on Saturday, because someone is running a campaign of false copyright strikes against our channel. There’s this new thing where you can pay some people and they’ll just keep filing copyright strikes until you get taken down. And YouTube has zero way for anybody to reach out to a human and explain what’s happening. So every day we wake up to more copyright strikes. We’ve been fighting them the best we can.

But all of that is to say, I think the best review of my book is coming from the Silicon Valley billionaire platforms that are trying to ban me. But it’s too late. My book is now on the shelves. I’m here in New York today. I just went to Barnes and Noble and it’s already out on the shelf. We’ve gotta find ways around these platforms.

We’re gonna get the message out one way or the other. But I take it as a compliment that somebody really, really, really wants me deplatformed from everywhere, even though, by the way, I have never broken any rules.

JEAN GUERRERO

Exactly. Well, so Gil, what can people do? You talk a little bit about this in your book. What is the way forward? How do we fight back against these people with these crazy ideas that they’ve somehow turned into self-fulfilling prophecies? How do we create a different world, when some of the most powerful people on this planet are intent on creating this world that you describe, that’s so horrifying.

GIL DURÁN

We need to remember the old saying that money is the root of all evil. And we have to realize that billionaires are the root of all of our problems today.

We can have billionaires or we can have democracy. We cannot have both.

We’re in a terrible situation where the economic inequality has meant that there’s this tiny class of billionaires, some of them part-time trillionaires, deciding that it is their destiny to rule over us, as they have enough money to buy power in a political system that is very vulnerable to corruption, especially through crypto, which has become a weapon of mass corruption in the second Trump era. And in fighting billionaire power, we find the key to all of our problems, because even before the tech fascists, somehow everything has been stacked in favor of a tiny few so that they can get richer. But the money only makes them crazier and it doesn’t make them happier.

So we have to find a way to envision a world without billionaires, because the billionaires are envisioning a world without us.

JEAN GUERRERO

Yeah. I heard you say on a different interview that the politics of the future is a war against billionaires. And by the way, it’s a war that they started. I think that’s so key, because as we’re seeing the rise of democratic socialists across the country presenting a different kind of politics, there’s still this stubbornness within Democratic Party leaders to not wanna call it out for what it is, which is that the billionaires are the ones who are making everybody’s lives miserable. And particularly this movement that is determined to create a world without us, or at least with extreme inequality.

Anyway, I just want to thank you for writing this book, because I think it’s such an important step in getting everybody educated, understanding what’s happening, so they can start to push for regulation and whatever else we need to rein in these billionaires.

GIL DURÁN

Unfortunately, the only people as addicted to billionaire money as Republicans are Democrats. It’s funny to see the establishment Democrats getting so angry at the democratic socialists and the left for winning elections. The democratic socialists and the people on the left are the ones who are fighting. And the Democratic Party’s own polls show that people want fighters.

JEAN GUERRERO

They do.

GIL DURÁN

The establishment doesn’t want to give the people what they want, because they want to maintain relations with the billionaires. So I do think we’re going to need a bit of a civil war in the Democratic Party.

And we need to fight on the side of people who are willing to name the problem as billionaire power, and who are willing to fight against that without any fear of the ramifications. I hate to use the war metaphor, it’s a destructive one. There’s no other way to put what’s happening right now. The billionaires have declared war on us and we need to realize that that’s going on. And anybody who thinks we can somehow just make nice and go back to the status quo, there is no status quo under tech fascism.

JEAN GUERRERO

One hundred percent. Well, thank you so much, Gil, for this conversation and for this book, and I wish you the best with it.

GIL DURÁN

Thanks, and thanks for hosting the possibly final episode of the Nerd Reich podcast on YouTube, though we’ll still be on all audio platforms, and we’ll find somewhere else to put the videos where we’re allowed to talk about these issues. And thanks so much for participating in this.