Project 2025, Silicon Valley & Tech’s AI War on Democracy

New: What happens when tech AI, billionaires, algorithms, and Project 2025 collide? Brooke Harrington and Adam Becker join The Nerd Reich to reveal how Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break democracy” mindset is reshaping our future.

We cover a lot of ground in this episode and, despite the scary topics, we get some laughs out of it. Please give us a click below to watch this new episode:

Prefer audio?

Click here for the Nerd Reich podcast on Apple Podcasts

Click here for the Nerd Reich podcast on Spotify

Available wherever you get your podcasts!

See below for transcript.

Why The Nerd Reich Newsletter Exists

The Nerd Reich is brought you by 677 paid subscribers. Their contributions allow us to expose tech fascism, produce a high-quality podcast, and more. Can you help us get to 1000 paid subscribers by 2026? If so, please click here to keep this work going!

The Nerd Reich Podcast - Mailbag Episode

Transcripts are auto-generated and may contain errors.

Producer RR Robbins: Welcome to The Nerd Reich and our first ever Mailbag episode. I'm producer R.R. Robbins. This is what you wanted to know, all taken from your questions in the comment section of our YouTube videos. And your queries cover a lot of ground, from the state of authoritarianism today to the centralized AI economy of tomorrow, from what the end game looks like for the tech right to why they don't seem to understand the point of dystopian fiction, and a whole lot more. Answering your questions are our returning guests from the podcast's launch episode, Brooke Harrington, a professor in economic sociology from Dartmouth University. She's the author of Offshore, Stealth Wealth, and The New Colonialism. Joining her is astrophysicist Adam Becker, the author of More Everything Forever, and a guest from one of our most watched episodes, our final guest, Gil Duran. For one episode, Gil's not your host, he's in the hot seat answering your questions. So let's get to them on this special episode of The Nerd Reich.

Adam Becker: Happy to be here.

Brooke Harrington: Thank you.

Gil Duran: You are two of our highest rated pod guests so far. And Brooke was also one of our first pod guests with Dave Karpf. So we got a lot of comments, things from our readers and our listeners. And so today we're going to go through some of those, you know, get a general mailbag episode going here. We haven't done one of those and that makes it easier for me since I don't have to write it all out.

So before we get to the questions from readers and listeners, let's start with a general temperature check. We're nine months into this administration. Masked men with guns are kidnapping people off the streets. The drunk known as the Secretary of Defense just gathered the nation's top generals in one room and told them that they're fat, undisciplined and suggested that they'll be doing battle against their fellow citizens sometime soon. And if they don't like it, they should resign. And the economy seems likely to stall out some point and the government is currently shut down. So how do you think it's going so far? Is this pretty much what you expected? Is it better or is it worse? Brooke will start with you.

Brooke Harrington: Worse. Faster. It's like double speed. I remember a couple of months ago, I was at a conference where Ruth Ben-Ghiat was speaking too. And one of the questions I had is, is it my misperception or are things moving way, way faster than any other fascist takeover?

And she was like, yeah, they are moving faster. No one has ever moved this fast. So clearly what we're seeing has been planned for a long time. We saw most of it with Project 2025, but they were totally serious about it, contrary to many major media reports. And they had this ready to roll out like a military operation, a war against America, and that's how it's been executed.

Gil Duran: Adam, how are you feeling? Is this worse than you expected or?

Adam Becker: I can't honestly say that it's worse than I expected. I kind of figured that it was going to go down like this. I didn't, you know, I'm not a prophet. I didn't think that it was going to go down specifically the way that it has, but I thought that there would be massive ICE enforcement almost immediately.

And it would take this sort of Gestapo-like form. And it has. And I also thought that they would just start disregarding the rule of law immediately. And they have. I would say the thing that's been worse than I expected is that I really thought that Democratic Party leadership would try to fight back more than they have. And maybe that was me being naive, but it's been a real disappointment.

Brooke Harrington: All institutional leadership, not just, I mean, there are very few institutions that have fought back.

Gil Duran: Yeah, high expectations.

Brooke Harrington: My employer institution just got the extortion note along with other universities from Trump saying, you know, nice little research institution you got there. It would be a shame if something happened to it. How about you sign on to my little compact, wink? And they're actually meeting in a few hours to talk about what to do. And like naively from 5,000 miles away, I'm like, I know this meeting is going to be about how big the middle finger should be in response to this, because that's all Trump understands is, you know, make me. I'm praying that they've learned from watching the last eight months that capitulation does nothing but invite more extortion attempts. But we'll see.

Gil Duran: One thing I've been thinking about recently watching so many institutions cave or give up or negotiate away their rights is that I think we have too many people from affluent backgrounds and leadership positions in this country. And to me, that means that they have never had to stand up to a bully and push back. And so they think that, let me just give you my lunch money and it'll be okay. And that's generally not how it works. You know, you have to fight back. You have to set a precedent. You have to draw a line. And so to see so many people cave has been really disappointing. I really thought people would fight a lot harder for this country.

That's at least what I was brought up to believe during the Cold War with all those Rambo movies and Red Dawn and all of this. You know, when Trump talked about an enemy within, we do have something like that going on right now. And, you know, it's the people who are trampling the constitution and trying to break the country. Hopefully people will, people in positions of power will start fighting back harder. There have been some victories. And I think what I've been surprised by is the degree of chaos that has taken place to some degree. Elon Musk, for instance, the DOGE thing fell apart much faster than I thought it would. And in a way that I don't think was a planned explosion. It was the rapid unscheduled disassembly is what happened and saying basically that the president is a pedo guy.

So there are things like that that give me hope where I'm like, y'all don't have it all figured out. And this was actually quite a suicidal, destructive breakup that they had. On that note, it has been a mixed bag in some ways for tech in terms of getting everything they want. You know, they got the friendly crypto bill, but they failed to get a blanket ban on AI regulation. As I just mentioned, they had Elon Musk lording over the federal government at DOGE, but then he had a massive falling out with Trump and, you know, burned all the bridges on the way out. They're trying to rebuild them now. Lately, we've also seen that there are some extremists in the MAGA base who are putting a target on the tech broligarchs. One even called for holy war against Silicon Valley. So how would you rate Silicon Valley's performance as a new power player in Washington? Adam, we'll start with you on that one.

Adam Becker: I think that unfortunately they're still wielding a fair amount of power. Larry Ellison and Marc Andreessen just got control of TikTok and that's horrifying. It's exactly what they wanted. So now they've got access to like the social media stream. That's a massive amount of power. Speaking of Ellison, it's Ellison's son who's behind the CBS nonsense. You know, he got CBS to shut up Stephen Colbert. Colbert's show has not been uncancelled. I mean, he's on the air, but this is the last season. You know, that's pretty effective, unfortunately. Yeah, Musk and Trump had a falling out, but yeah, they're trying to undo it right now.

And meanwhile, Trump's chief science advisor is still somebody, you know, made in Thiel world, completely biased and like outlandish and weird, unworkable ideas about what science is and how the world works that come with being a product of Thiel World. And he is, you know, the guy guiding the Trump administration on science. He gave a really unhinged speech a couple of months ago that I really think did not get enough press, enough critical press, pointing out just how insane it was. Talking about science leading us into the stars, taking over the universe, all of that crap, making energy too cheap to meter, which is not happening. It's a lot of hyper-libertarian claptrap. It's really disheartening to see it coming from, but not unexpected to see it coming from these people. So I don't know, this is a long rambling answer to basically say I unfortunately think they're still wielding a firm grip.

Gil Duran: Brooke, what do you make of Silicon Valley's performance so far?

Brooke Harrington: Don't they use terms like dark Renaissance to describe their intellectual ambitions? Am I misremembering that?

Adam Becker: Dark enlightenment.

Brooke Harrington: I know, right? Fuckers. I'm sitting here in Florence, birthplace of the actual Renaissance. And as I'm listening to Adam, I'm thinking, everything you've just described is like through the looking glass. It's the anti-Renaissance. It's anti-human, it's anti-science, it's anti-progress, it's anti-life in every possible way. They're making a stupider, poorer, sicker, and they're destroying the arts and knowledge in the process. And I'm just like, these fuckers, you know? It's like, do you remember in 2001 after 9/11 happened, the conventional wisdom was they hate our freedoms, they used our freedoms against us.

Well, these guys in Silicon Valley are actually doing that. They're doing everything that the 9/11 hijackers were accused of. They've used the openness of our society, our freedom of speech, our freedom to make a fortune with very little constraint from taxes to any kind of regulation. And they've used it to destroy what made them prosper. And they're trying to roll it all back, seize all the benefits from themselves, and essentially refeudalize the world.

And that really pisses me off. And more people should be pissed about it. Centuries of people died to get us here to the point where we don't have 50% infant mortality, where we have lifespans beyond an average of approximately 25 years. And they want to take it all away so they can be just marginally richer and compete with each other more with their little penis rockets. That's my little rant, Fritz Lorin.

Gil Duran: I think you are both correct. I think they're not perfect. They're making some mistakes, but they don't really care, right? That's their whole strategy is to move fast and break things. And in this case, they're trying to move fast and break democracy. And we'll get into some of that a little deeper here in the questions. And so we're going to go to those questions now. And for that, we go to Nerd Reich producer R.R. Robbins.

Producer RR Robbins: All right, well, before we get into the questions for Adam and Brooke, yesterday was the third annual Network State Conference in Singapore. We covered the Network State in our first pod. We have some questions about that from our videos on how the Network State relates to Trump's desire to steal Greenland, rebuild Freedom Cities, all of it. At Malta Martin wants an update on one of the Bay Area Freedom Cities. Can you tell us if the Tech Bros purchase of land in Solano County in order to build a utopian city was part of the Network State plan? It seems to be on hold for now. At the Senate 1844 thinks he's heard the network state pitch before and the right used to be against it. Wait, hold up. Isn't this literally exactly what people on the far right were claiming the World Economic Forum was gonna do, except now it's a great thing. And @KarenBP7295 doesn't get the tech bro appeal. "I don't understand how they round up so many loyalists. Why are people loyal to these guys? What's in it for them?"

So Gil, to you, can you give us where we are with regard to just the network state movement?

Gil Duran: Well, the reason people are loyal to these guys or at least pretend to be is because they have a lot of money. You know, the people pushing this are in venture capital or have been hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. And so what you have is a lot of young people who want to somehow find a way to get into that world and will sit there and go along with any weird thing they do just to get in the room and try to get face time with a venture capitalist.

So I think that's part of the, the reason why these guys attract crowds. I did see a photo posted that showed a bunch of empty seats at the network state conference in Singapore, and there were only 200 people watching on YouTube. I'm not sure about Twitter. The stream wasn't working for me when I tried to look at it.

But I think where we are is they are still trying to get Trump to go along and do the freedom cities. And he'll probably get around to that at some point. There's been a lot of saber rattling about building the freedom cities, but we haven't seen too much concrete action yet in terms of doing that here in the United States. We do see them now unveiling this big plan for Gaza that in the initial form looked a lot like a network state, perhaps not a Balaji branded network state, but certainly a network of like-minded capitalists trying to create a new zone that would be ruled over by Tony Blair in Gaza. So we do see this idea occurring outside of Balaji Srinivasan's framework. And so I think it's something that's still very much on their mind.

Though I would say that, you know, one of the tweets that got the most attention from yesterday's network state conference was a fellow tech person explaining in very simple terms why all of Balaji's ideas are completely childlike and stupid, which all of us on this podcast have reckoned with before. As Dave Karpf said, Balaji's book is a blueprint drawn in crayons. So they're still going to try to do it. But I think that they're running into some obstacles in Solano County, for instance, nobody wanted that weird city. So they took it off the ballot, but now they're trying to build some big factory zone to do all this stuff. And to me, that's just a backdoor way to try to get the city built by saying, now we're economic providers and now we need to have housing for all of our workers.

So they're not going to stop trying when you've bought a billion dollars worth of land and you got to get it done.

Producer RR Robbins: Well, let's get into some of the questions from Brooke and Adam's episode, starting with the economy. @Gertzer: "Brooke's talk about old economists moved some books. I bought a bunch of Keynes's books. I wanted to be familiar with his work." Also, a lot of questions went into our economic system from Tricia Howey, 3653, who controls illegally our reserves and chooses our monetary foundation? From Sherry Gabbard, 1885, "doesn't their success depend on everything having a value defined by currency? Would they buy armies to enforce what they believe they've purchased?" And at ThomasCongleton126S: "Are we ignoring the power of the consumer and the impact they have in feeding the oligarch?"

So, Brooke, what are we learning about the billionaire broligarch class in 2025 now that their masks are fully off? What is the role they have in our lives and what is their vision of the future?

Brooke Harrington: I think their vision of the future is feudalism without any of the obligations. So, you know, in the actual feudal system, if you starve the peasants to death, the pope might excommunicate you. Like, there were real and meaningful punishments for being a dick to the little people.

Now there aren't. There is no pope. And these guys like Putin and Thiel, they honestly sincerely believe that if they just tweak the right levers and have the right, you know, blood transfusions, they can live to be 200 years old. That is their frontier of competition now, is to live forever and rule over the rest of us. And if we die untimely, painful and unnecessary deaths, well, we're just the eggs they're breaking to make an omelet. To the question about the role of the consumer, the problem is we do have a lot of power as consumers, as the boycott that led to Jimmy Kimmel's reinstatement showed, the problem is that public goods, by definition, are not really subject to consumer pressure.

Like, if everything we were experiencing happened within a capitalist framework of goods purchased and sold by consumers and to consumers, we'd be fine. The problem is that Trump and the broligarchs are a bunch of brigands who are pillaging our public goods. Public goods are things that belong to all of us and we can't boycott them. We can't use consumer power as a lever over Trump deciding to pave over the Rose Garden and turn it into like the patio at an Arby's. We can't boycott Trump's decision to strong arm the director of the Eisenhower Museum into giving one of Ike's swords to King Charles. Just today, the director of the Eisenhower Museum in Abilene, Kansas, was told, resign or be fired because you wouldn't cave to Trump in this meaningless gesture.

Nothing special about Eisenhower swords, but those swords belong to us, the American people. They don't belong to Trump. They're not his to dispense, like Pez on children he wants to impress, they belong to the American people, just like the Rose Garden does. We can't stop him with consumer pressure. And that is the whole point. Americans understand consumerism very well. And we know how to wield that power. But we've forgotten completely what a public good is and how to wield our power to claim back what we already own. Because we've been conned by everyone since Reagan over the past 40 years into forgetting that we own things like the White House. It's our house. Trump doesn't get to build a ballroom just because he wants to. It's not his. He doesn't get to gild the Oval Office with this team of crap either. It's our house. We literally bought it with our tax money. Slaves built it. It's not his to desecrate, but he's doing it anyways. And there's nothing consumer power can do about that. Only voter power can. That's a civic problem. And Americans have basically been brainwashed into giving away their civic power.

Producer RR Robbins: You know, a lot of this got very dark as Brooke was just saying, but let's keep that going narratively. At LizaO'Connor2752 wants to know if the broligarchs actually know the reason for dark sci-fi. Quote, wasn't science fiction dystopian literature meant to be a cautionary tale? So the question, Adam, as a scholar of sci-fi, in addition to astrophysics, why are they rooting for Skynet and the Umbrella Corporation?

Adam Becker: Ha! Because they're the ones that win in dystopian science fiction. They don't understand the distinction between like, you know, dystopias and utopias. They only understand control and power. They're very simple minded. A great example for this is Neuromancer, which is being turned into a, I think a TV show now. But it's William Gibson's first novel, like one of the ur-texts, one of the primary novels of the cyberpunk wave and science fiction from, I think 1984-ish somewhere around there.

That is a novel about a world in which tech oligarchs are the only real power in the world and like nation states and other things are just kind of gone. You know, it's a libertarian wet dream. Gibson didn't like it, right? Gibson was showing what the world could be like if these guys get what they want. You know, a world where there's just sort of like weird urban squalor and no real law enforcement on the ground. And then, you know, tech billionaires living in space stations trying to live forever and build AI gods. And it seems, you know, eerily prescient until you realize, no, no, no, that's the blueprint. They're actually working off of that. They want to be villains in Neuromancer. Why don't they understand that those are the villains? It's because that would involve actually looking at themselves and realizing that they're fucked up people who want, you know, power and control more than they want, you know, the world to be a good place to live. And I don't think they're capable of that kind of critical self analysis.

Producer RR Robbins: Well, let's keep that going. Again, as we mentioned, 3000 comments. Some are pretty straightforward. At summer crow wife wants to know where are the flying cars? @LongKesh1971: "If tech bros are so smart, then why is Silicon Valley not the best place to live in America? A lot of people were livid that you kept your solution to yourselves and didn't put it on podcast. Just throwing that out there. There's the solution to this problem, but you're not going to tell us what it is so this guy can sell more books."

Gil Duran: Buy the book, loser. Exactly.

Producer RR Robbins: Mainly it was a lot of love for Adam's deep math on Elon's Mars BS. That said, as technical as Adam got, a number of our very technical audience wanted you to go further. So just an atmosphere where you need to work out how to generate several hundred trillion tons of air and where do you get that from? Says at Tony Wilson. At James Grant, on terraforming without a magnetosphere, won't any atmosphere be blown into space? There's a lot more of that, but we're gonna hold it because these science guys went deep for a long time. Surprising amount of comments though, were about money and Mars. From at one true keeper, Musk never explains what it is we would be doing there that would justify the expense and risks of sending people and hardware to the dangerous Martian surface. What is there that would generate revenue? And at misunderstood 103 was simpler. Why do people fall for the grift? That is Elon. So Adam, beyond the sheer impossibility and deadliness of life on Mars, is Mars just a big money loser?

Adam Becker: Yeah, no Mars is a money pit. You know, there's no economic plan for living on Mars because there's no real plan for living on Mars in the first place. There's nothing there. It's a giant, airless, cold, radiated desert. It is not a place that it is like reasonable to try to live in or even really possible to live in. All of those technical points that you raised. Yeah, that's all true. I just didn't get into those because the number of reasons why Mars is a horrible idea is just really, really long. And then that gets into this other question of, why does anybody fall for this? And that I think gets to the power of these narratives that the tech billionaires have sort of latched onto these science fiction ideas of things like colonizing Mars.

You know, Elon Musk is a horrible human being. But he is not responsible for the cultural obsession in the US and in other places in the world with colonizing Mars. He just took that idea and, you know, used it to promote what he wants and sell himself as a savior of humanity by taking us to Mars, which is not going to save anybody. And it's also not going to happen. Like there's a long history here of like why that happened, why Mars sort of holds this place in at least the American cultural psyche that it does. And that has to do with like a long history involving a set of early sci-fi stories about what Mars could be like. One astronomer thought there were canals on Mars, all of which were done before we understood that Mars is inhospitable and is certainly not home to any sort of complex life and is likely not home to any life at all.

Producer RR Robbins: Most of the questions were actually about AI. Many were also skeptical like Agnes9233 who asked, can anybody tell what AI does other than copy itself? But much of the AI talk was about the economy. At Andrew Birkin5505 went AI-E-I-O for his question.

How can AI do many of the jobs in farming? For example, build fences in undulating terrain, assist cows to give birth in an area with many trees at 3 a.m. in the rain, which in defense of AI seems very specific. Another specific take was from account recovery who speculated about the poor companies who needed singularity uploaded CEOs.

If they are no longer alive, how can they continue to deliver value to their shareholders? Finally, at SteveFToth asked, can we afford to build a super intelligence? Will building such a system create more problems, heat, greenhouse gases, pollution, et cetera, than it is able to solve? Brooke, how do we and how should we think about the AI economy?

Brooke Harrington: It's not a technological project. It's a social and political project wrapped in a thin veneer of technology. It's a way to discipline labor and politically terrorize people by saying, we're going to make you obsolete. You're going to starve in the streets. It's bullshit. AI has come along before. This is not the first time AI has come along with a lot of hype, like in The Music Man, where it turns out there's just a lot of smoke and mirrors there. And it takes a while for people to catch on. Oh yeah, this was all hype. No action, all hat, no ranch. But this time it's taking longer and a lot more people are losing their jobs. Especially after the COVID pandemic, the idea that people would demand and succeed in working from home, recapturing some of their personal time and not being under the thumb of management at all times. That's a profound threat to control and domination and bureaucracies. And since the obsession of all these broligarchs is control and domination, they're not about to let that happen. That's why they have this very selective vision even of sci-fi literature. There's a lot of diversity in sci-fi literature, a lot of visions of society and worlds that could be. But somehow they always focus on the ones that are dystopian and narratives about power and control and misery.

They're not looking at people like Ray Bradbury. He's probably my favorite sci-fi author. He grew up in Libertyville, Illinois, not too far from where I grew up. He's an autodidact who spent a lot of time in the library teaching himself things. One of the things I love about Ray Bradbury's work is that humans are always at the center of it. Technology is just a vehicle for shedding light on what humans are and how we work. Fahrenheit 451, for example, or the stories in The Illustrated Man.

I've never heard of a broligarch or any kind of CEO in any industry who's a fan of Ray Bradbury. Why? Because Bradbury's vision is profoundly humanistic. It's about the folly of trusting in technology to solve all your problems. It's about the folly of trying to control and dominate and the value of being human. These broligarchs reject all of that. They don't just reject a normal mortal lifespan. They reject humanity. They're essentially failed human beings, as far as I can tell. They're missing a chip somewhere, to use a technological analogy. And they've turned that into a virtue.

To go back to economics for a second, the ideal human in economic theory is called homo economicus. And homo economicus is at all times making decisions in an autonomous, independent way, regardless of the effect of its decisions on other living creatures or the planet. And it's always selfish. It's always selfish and always fully informed. That was always supposed to be kind of a stylized model that would allow economists to predict certain things and create parsimonious structures in their theories. But it has taken on a moral valence.

Like if you don't behave like homo economicus, that means you're irrational or stupid. So these tech bros are like the closest flesh and blood embodiment we have to this economic ideal of someone who is like perfectly selfish and heedless of others at all times. They don't know what a public good is. They don't think about society. They don't think about other human beings except as failed machines. They think of themselves as failed machines, which is why they're always trying to like put in spare parts so they can live forever. What do they call it? Biohacking and brain hacking and you can't hack a human being. We're human. We're not machines. They've got everything like upside down. The machines are supposed to serve us, but now they're like, they're trying to merge with the machine and they think that's a good thing.

Producer RR Robbins: Well, speaking of the ghost in the machine, frankly, the beast in the machine, Gil, beastly number of questions from the Peter Thiel and Antichrist Playbook pod, also from our TESCREAL pod, Silicon Valley's dark new religion, at Guglierg, wants you to stop throwing the late Professor Girard under the bus when it comes to Peter Thiel. He might have taken a class with him, but so what? Girard would be horrified by each and every word that Thiel utters. At Mary Bradley asked that the Tech Bros are quote, terrified of dying because of religious reasons and wants to know if it's because they know there's something beyond human death they can't control. What if they know and understand the beginning and are trying to escape their ending? Following up on that Christly theme, At Sunny Days asked about the Christian establishment and asked, how Christian theologians and pastors are reacting to these ideas? Surely Christians and associated religious people would be openly rejecting these theories. Where is the religious world right now on this new anti-Christ connection to tech? Lord knows people have been talking about it on Blue Sky.

Gil Duran: They're definitely starting to tee off on Thiel's Antichrist weirdness. And that was part of why I sought at the end of August to make it a big deal. Cause I figured this is gonna be one of those things and he comes here and the brain dead San Francisco media is not going to cover it. And it's just going to be like, no one's going to pay attention to this weird stuff going on with Peter Thiel. So I started making a lot of drama around it. And, coincidentally, there's been a lot of coverage and actually Wired just did a great piece that obviously was in the works for months where someone went really deep on Peter Thiel's antichrist obsession. And what you see from the theologians in Austria where he gave a secret antichrist lecture earlier this year or last year, and from a, there was an Episcopal priest who just wrote a piece for the San Francisco Standard is that theologians very much reject Peter Thiel as some kind of expert or a thinker on these biblical topics.

This is DIY theology. And what I've compared it to is it would be as if Peter Thiel suddenly decided to get into modern dance and to self-train himself and then to go around the world giving modern dance performances on a stage to an audience of people who would be, you know, forced to sit there and watch it because he's a billionaire and they think it's some kind of scene to make. And I think he's really embarrassed himself with this, but also given us an indication of how disconnected from reality these guys are. There is no cause whatsoever for Peter Thiel, the Palantir and PayPal billionaire who has said that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible, to go around the world giving secret lectures about the Antichrist. This is very odd, very strange and very disturbing. And I think it's starting to backfire in a pretty big way.

And one thing I'd say that gives me hope was I went to the first Antichrist lecture he gave here in San Francisco, and I mostly hung out at the back door trying to interview Peter Thiel, but I think there's another secret entrance they had because the entourage of waiting people moved at some point and obviously they went to some other door. But there was a huge street theater element of people mocking and protesting Peter Thiel. There were some supposed Satanists who were praising the arrival of their new Antichrist. I mean, people really roasted the hell out of him. And I think that's an important tool we have against these guys, as I think Brooke Harrington has said before, stigma is a weapon we have against these guys. And so when you've got the theologians in the country of Hitler's birth and every other religious figure who weighs in saying, what are you talking about?

I think that's some pretty good pushback. Of course he's not going to stop. And when the economic stuff gets bad for Trump, I'm assuming he'll be crying about the Antichrist as well.

Producer RR Robbins: A lot of questions, even going back to our first short video, went full Avengers, people want to know about end games. At 02689 asks, what does using AI and crypto to make their power permanent really mean? I know they are investing a lot to create better AI, but what are you suggesting that they would have in achieving these goals?

The same question with crypto. Peppokiss asks, I need to know what's the end game for all this. What are they trying to accomplish? If they do all that, then what? What will the next years be like? And I guess, why? Why would they do this? And at Mother Goose 7344 wants to know about our end game. What is the end game for middle to lower class citizens? That's the question I need answered. Brooke, what are some end games here for us and for them?

Brooke Harrington: To return to the sci-fi theme, I think everyone needs to watch the film Elysium. It's a film I think about a lot these days because it's a vision of an end game here in which the rich have basically colonized the earth in the name of themselves rather than any empire, like old-style colonialism. And they live above the fray, literally, while extracting all the resources of the earth and letting us all die untimely deaths doing the extraction for them. It's, as I said, like feudalism without any of the obligations.

I think that is their foolhardy end game, but they're so limited as humans, they're such failed human beings, they can't think far enough ahead to go, okay, well, if you kill all your minions, if you kill all your peasants, as they're extracting the riches of the earth for your benefit and making you marginally richer, what's left to enjoy? You're also going to kill all the artists. You're going to kill the court jesters who amuse you. I mean, that spectacle in Riyadh recently of Chappelle, for example, having the unbelievable nerve to get on stage in Riyadh and criticize free speech in America, standing on the soil of a country where anyone without a penis gets flogged and thrown in prison for saying, hey, we're human beings too. People like that will always survive. They'll be the court jesters of the rich. But eventually, if you kill too many peasants, you also are killing the people who give birth to the next artist to amuse the rich people. And so what they'll create is this utterly sterile environment that sort of mirrors what they are on the inside. They'll get to live forever, but in a world that is no longer amusing to them. So I don't know, I think everyone should be forced to watch both Elysium and Doctor Strangelove, because we're living in some kind of mashup of both of those in my opinion.

Adam Becker: I agree that this is what they want. They want a world where, you know, they get to extract resources from the earth without suffering any consequences. And actually going back to space questions, what do they want? They want to escape from consequences by going to space. And I think they see that as an escape from needing to think about politics as well. They just want their own power and they don't want to have to care about the rest of us as long as they can extract wealth from us. But of course, you know, first of all, they are, as Brooke said, failed human beings. They don't understand that politics will follow you wherever you go, because politics is just something that happens when you have people together. They also don't understand that they need us.

You know, I, in a way, hope that they try to literally do what happens in Elysium or in Neuromancer and, you know, actually try to rule us from space because that would make it very, very easy to bring them to heel because it turns out that space sucks and that your supply lines to space are very, very limited. Even if you own SpaceX, you're at the mercy of everyone on the ground. You know, one of the reasons it's so hard to understand what these guys want, which is sort of the emotion that I'm hearing behind all of these questions about the end game, is that their end game doesn't really make any sense if you apply any critical reasoning to it or, you know, breathe on it wrong. It just falls apart. What they want is a fantasy world that does not work because they are terrible at imagining things for themselves and terrible at understanding other people's imaginations, which is why they don't understand science fiction and have completely misunderstood what kinds of futures are possible or what science fiction is even about, right?

These are people who watch, you know, one of the great pieces of social commentary of the 20th century, Star Trek, and think that it's about warp drive rather than about, you know, building a better and more just future. The thing is, the future end game that they want is one where they have a super intelligent AI God to heel on a leash that they control that, you know, gives them everything that they want while they live forever in the sky and the rest of us suffer here on the ground. The good news is that's not possible. That future is not coming. That's the good news. The bad news is in the attempt to get there, these guys will recreate feudalism and oppress all of us. And so like what their actual end game ends up looking like is just, you know, death and destruction on a large scale while they, you know, maintain resources and try to hide out in their bunkers while the world goes to shit.

I think it's in their enlightened self-interest to prevent that from happening. The problem is that they don't understand that. You know, they think that they've found a way to live forever and maintain control and have, you know, wealth and resources forever. If they haven't, it's not going to work. But you can't convince them of that because going back to something Gil said, you know, they think that they're experts on everything, right? This is why Peter Thiel has gone around and given these lectures on the Antichrist. You know, he had the option of staying at home and saying nothing, but he thinks that he's the smartest guy in the world because he's one of the wealthiest guys in the world. And that's just not how anything works, but you can't tell them that because they don't listen. They're too venal and stupid to understand just how venal and stupid.

Gil Duran: You forgot kinky.

Brooke Harrington: Like Trump, they summarily eject anyone who isn't a yes man. Anyone who would tell them, hey, emperor, you have no clothes on, gone. And that's how you get people. That and never taking a humanities class is how you get people who think they can reinvent history, who think that Balaji is a philosopher or that Curtis Yarvin is a philosopher. If you've never actually encountered ideas and been trained in critical thinking, if all you know is ones and zeros and whiz bang code, it's really easy to snow you with big talk that crumbles under the slightest examination or contact with reality.

Producer RR Robbins: All right, well on that, we could keep going for a while. In fact, we've probably got about four dozen questions that we didn't get to, but this is our most asked question. It all basically boils down to what can we do about it? From DC policy geek, it's strange how many seemingly don't want to know, understand how else can elected leaders and media professionals be effective. Self-identify European listener, Walda Unterverdier, we dig egg. Possibly pronounced that wrong. If the Democratic Party is so corrupted, what about starting a third party? And the big one from KDZQ50Q says, Now the issues are outlined. What actionable steps are next for positive action to combat this? What is being done besides talking about it and creating awareness? What do we do now?

Gil Duran: Well, building awareness is crucial because the mainstream media has done a very poor job of it. I don't think people fully understand from watching the news or reading a newspaper how serious this is because I think the objective neutral approach that most outlets try to take has the effect of laundering authoritarianism and making it sound as if what's happening might be some kind of reasonable political position to take. And so I do think it's important to make people aware.

So when people ask like, what action should we do? That is an action. Making people aware is an action. Informing people is an important action. Most of this is a propaganda war. And part of the problem is that we don't have a media ecosystem that is capable of dealing with fascism.

I think if these guys end up winning, I don't think they will I'm still optimistic— It'll largely be because our media failed so badly at this moment. And it'll take massive reform if we get through this to make sure nothing like this ever happens again. There's a lot of cowardice we're seeing. There's a lot of collaboration and cooperation and attempts to make it seem as if fascism might be a perfectly reasonable final stage for the American experiment.

And so raising awareness and pushing back, that's what we do. Right? I also think that people need to be ready to hit the streets more regularly. I think this is going to end with millions of Americans in the street demanding their country back. And I think that's going to scare the crap out of a lot of these guys. You know, that's what they fear. They fear the masses. There are a lot more of us than there are of them. People aren't properly activated yet. I think that's going to happen, especially if Trump makes good on his promise to try to escalate military tactics against the American people.

Adam Becker: Now I am going to give the spoiler at the end of my book. We should be working toward a world where we tax billionaires out of existence. Now, how do we get from here to there? That's tough. My standard answer to this is to say that there are a lot more of us than there are of them. And to remind people, you know, that the White House is our house. And so was a little weird to hear both Gil and Brooke give the lines that I usually give when I'm giving talks about this.

But I guess reassuring as well, because I think both of them know a lot more than I do. I think that we need better political organization around going after oligarchs and concentrated wealth specifically. And I think that that means pushing the opposition party that we have, which is the Democratic Party to do that. And that means calling our elected leaders. That means demonstrations. That means raising awareness that means, you know, doing everything that we can talking with our friends and neighbors because we wield political power collectively, right? Getting the people around us to understand what's at stake and how we can fight back is a way of fighting.

Gil Duran: And Brooke.

Brooke Harrington: I think I have some good news. I would like to subscribe to Adam's newsletter. Everything he said, I agree with. I'd also like to like throw in my sociological two cents by saying, we have to remember that the Achilles heel of the broligarchs, of all fascist leaders, is they want to be liked.

It's not enough for them to be obeyed. They want our devotion. They want our smiling submission. It's not enough that we submit, it's that we have to smile and say that we like them and they're the bestest boys. We can withhold that. Mockery and shunning are nonviolent and extraordinarily effective. And I want people to understand I'm not just pulling this out of the air, this isn't my opinion. This is the result not only of my almost 20 years of research on the ultra rich, and believe me, I was as surprised as anyone to hear about this, but it's also the finding of people who study fascism.

You can wound these people mortally by mocking them into oblivion. And that's why you get people like Elon Musk, who ought to be laughing all the way to the bank every time someone roasts him. He doesn't do that. He calls them pedos. He launches his own little personal ego jihad against them. And Trump does too. He holds those grudges for decades, for Christ's sake. And we're seeing him on his vengeance tour, getting back at like everyone on his little middle school burn book. We can use that. That is a social force that we can use at approximately zero cost with no violence. Shun these people, mock them, roast them every chance you get. You can do it from the comfort of your own home. And we can build solidarity through that. And I think we should do it a lot more. Whoever would... But there was a pundit who just wrote an essay about how shame is naughty naughty and we shouldn't use it. Do you know who I'm talking about?

Adam Becker: Yeah, but I don't remember who it was.

Gil Duran: Was it Eter-Pay Hiel-Thay?

Brooke Harrington: It was an actual pundit. It was an actual pundit, you know, one of those, you know, moderate, sensible centrists. And I'm here to tell you, that is bullshit. We have to use shame more. We should use it more. Stigmatize more. Mock and roast more.

Adam Becker: I want to subscribe to your newsletter as well. I think you're right.

Producer RR Robbins: Gil, anything you want to use to wrap this out?

Gil Duran: Anytime you hear somebody describe themselves as moderate or centrist, you're about to hear some bullshit.

Producer RR Robbins: And that is our mailbag. Thank you to our guests, Brooke, Adam, and Gil. And to our audience for those great questions. We'll see you again real soon. Right now, it's time for me to read the credits.

The Nerd Reich Podcast is produced by me. It's written by Gil, and you should definitely sign up for the newsletter at thenerdreich.com.

And if you leave a comment on the next YouTube videos, it just might be in the next mailbag episode. Our next podcast guest, Paulina Borsook. You loved hearing her story in the viral Blue Sky thread. Now, hear it from her.

Today's final words from Albert Einstein. “It is not that I am so smart, but I stay with the questions much longer.”

See you next time.