Trump's Nightmare Gets Worse After All This is Exposed

And if you look at those ideas, these are held by the people at the top of AI companies, verb, billionaires, people believe this stuff, that AI is going to do all these miraculous things. They're going to create God, they're going to live forever, and they're going to get eternal life, they're going to go into the heavens, and they're going to have paradise. They're recreating the Christian religion with a Silicon Valley face. I want to welcome to I've had it weekend, Gil Duran. He is the author of a new must read book, and the title is incredible. The nerd, Reich, are you kidding me? That is so good, and it's about the Silicon Valley fascism and the war on democracy. Gil, thank you so much. Welcome. Thanks for having me. All right, so these tecologarks are something, or people that are, I've ascended to incredible power, and they are basically embedding themselves now into the federal government. And JD Vance is really interesting to me. I talk about him all of the time. I say that he is America's top prostitute, because he was purchased by Peter Teal and bankrolled every step of his career was bankrolled by Peter Teal. This is a guy who said that Trump was America's Hitler, and then all of a sudden he's working with America's Hitler. How much power does Peter Teal have over the vice president? And what does that tell us about who really runs the country? I think JD Vance is a wholly owned subsidiary of Peter Teal. The only reason he is where he is today is because of Peter Teal every step of the way. Teal has been his sugar daddy in venture capital, in politics, getting him into the Senate with $15 million and getting Trump to endorse him, even though Vance had previously called him America's Hitler, a cultural opioid, and a heroin of the masses. I mean, these insults. And how do you get the president to endorse a guy who's called them all those names with money, basically? So every step of the way he's been wholly owned by Peter Teal. And the most disturbing part of the entire story is that JD Vance even became a Catholic, from being an atheist, became a Catholic, changed his religion, inspired by Peter Teal, which he actually writes about in his memoir that just came out recently. Peter Teal's not even Catholic. So this is how much power Peter Teal has over JD Vance. He even got him to change his God. So Peter Teal is such a fascinating character. He's gay. But he also has a side hustle of lecturing about the Antichrist, which is really bizarre. What is his deal with his obsession with the Antichrist? Let's pop this up really quick. Peter Teal is now slamming Obama and Pope Leo in new Antichrist lectures. What do you think all of this is about? I think Peter Teal might suspect that he's the Antichrist. At the very least, I think he wants the question answered. He's working really hard to associate his name with Antichrist. You know how search engine optimization works? In 50 years, if people are searching for Antichrist, they're going to have a whole Peter Teal section on Wikipedia. Peter Teal's obsession with the Antichrist. It boils down to the fact that Peter Teal's will want to be intellectual. He's not really. He's read five things. That's all he's been talking about for the past 30 years. I've had this fortune of spending a lot of time with those things. And even though he's not particularly godly, he says he's religious but not spiritual. So he likes the rules-based order of religion without the whole man in the sky. God, Jesus, he thinks. In his lectures, his Antichrist lectures, he says, we're not going to talk a lot about Jesus today. Which is weird because Christianity is supposed to be about Jesus Christ, not Antichrist. So what Peter Teal's doing is preaching what I call anti-Christianity. A new theology focused on this kink, this obsession he has with publicly humiliating himself with these Antichrist lectures. And his basic argument is pretty simple. Everybody Peter Teal doesn't like is the Antichrist. The Pope, Greta Tunberg, AOC, Obama potentially, and if you dig deep enough, even democracy itself is the cradle of the Antichrist. And the only other person talking this way, by the way, the same source, this same lecture is Alexander Dugan, the fascist philosopher in Russia, who's known as Putin's brain. So this kind of like Antichrist mind virus from Russia, that Peter Teal's really big on right now. And it's very strange. You don't really see this kind of thing. I used to do PR before I returned to journalism. And someone should tell Peter Teal, you should not be talking about the Antichrist, especially since if you look at his Antichrist lectures, and I've been able to obtain all of them that have come out, that he's San Francisco, Nashville. He is not making much sense. But when he does describe his Antichrist, it sounds a lot like Peter Teal, someone who will go around the world preaching about doom and apocalypse in order to scare people and seize mass amounts of control. And in his argument, anybody who gets in the way of AI acceleration is the Antichrist. The only thing maximizing acceleration of AI can we somehow save humanity and fulfill the mission of Christianity. And that's a very self-serving argument since he's so heavily invested in AI. So Peter Teal, it's my understanding. He wants to dismantle democracy. He knows that he can't do that via the ballot box. And so he is he's purchased JD Vance. Do you think he purchased JD Vance and installed him because there's hope that Trump's old doesn't seem to be in the best of health. Although he does seem like the Energizer bending. He just keeps going and going. In hopes that he is installing a puppet for then Peter Teal to run the United States through JD Vance. Oh, absolutely. What we're seeing right now is a whole scale effort by Silicon Valley to seize power by buying it. By buying the Republican Party, which is what they've essentially done. You know, Donald Trump, who called crypto scam is now a crypto billionaire, his family raking in billions of corrupt crypto profit. Now they're venture capitalists. All their companies have amazing luck suddenly and they start getting government contracts. And JD Vance is a longer term investment. The Trumps, they just jumped on board with it in the past couple of years because that was the deal on the table. But if Vance gets in there, we have a venture capitalist accelerationist who has expressed dangerous radical anti-American views in the White House. And it's bad enough he's one heartbeat away from the presidency. But that's very much the idea that Peter Teal's been spelling out in public for years. This idea that democracy is an outdated software system that is not going to make it out of the 21st century. And specifically, he's inspired by a prophecy from this 1997 book called the Sovereign Individual, which predicted that in the 21st century technology would render nation states like the United States and democracy itself obsolete. Specifically, the two technologies that named were something called cyber currency, a new kind of digital money that would undermine government authority and allow wealthy people to sneak their money around the world. And advance the automation with this new software computer systems that would replace most jobs and suck all the wealth to a handful of lucky people at the top. That's the conversation we're having about AI now. And so I think in Teal's mind, again, he's obsessed with prophecy. He's obsessed with the idea of predicting the future and somehow winning. The prophecies are all coming true. And here he is at the height of power. It's not just JD Vance, by the way, 2025 Bloomberg reported that 16 of Teal's closely connected deputies were in high levels in the Trump administration now, leaving their purchase in Silicon Valley to go into the government. So really, I think what you have, you must get all the attention. But really, I think what we have is government by Peter Teal. And it's a regime in waiting. The good news is it's very unpopular. People hate this stuff. Trump's about to go down in flames if we have a free and fair election. So this explains why Teal has now bought a mansion in Argentina. Yeah, I also read, and I don't know if you know anything about this, that in Argentina, he can set up this type of technofascist government that he wants to. It would be easier for him to do it there, because I guess he had tried this once before in Honduras, and it didn't work. And now I originally, when I read into the Argentina home that he purchased, I thought, oh, he's trying to get away because he thinks the Democrats are going to investigate him. But upon further review, I see that Malay is somebody that he's also purchased, and that he can start installing this, you know, government by technology by AI down there. Do you know anything about that? This idea that Teal's inspired by this future were technology collapses governments in that prophecy from this weird conspiracy book that inspired him. The idea was that in the future, different countries around the world would reorganize themselves to cater to this new wealthy elite class, and they would do the things like create tax free zones, and basically allow them to do whatever they want without regulation. And so you needed to collect multiple passports in order to sort of do this jurisdictional arbitrage, it's what it's called, where you go to whatever territory will let you do what you want to do. And so Malay is doing an Argentina is pushing legislation that would allow people to create like AI companies that don't even have any humans involved, and tax free AI zones. So they're trying to create this new place where basically the wealthy can evade taxes, evade regulations, do whatever they want. And as part of this philosophy is the idea that eventually wealthy people can essentially declare themselves as nations unto themselves. Have a territory that you declare, I don't know, anti-Christlandia, and it's your country and you can do whatever you want there. The idea, since they already have all the money, they now want sovereignty. They want to be free from democracy. They want to be free from law regulations and the rules of any nation. And this is really what they're chasing, if you look around. Donald Trump in 2024 promised to create ten new freedom cities on American soil, this was in his campaign plan. The idea was they're going to have some kind of reality TV contest and then hand out plots of federal land where corporations after winning this contest, which I'm sure Trump would judge, would get to build a new city. Now he hasn't done that yet, but to this day no one has ever explained what is a freedom city. Why do we need freedom cities, and where does the idea come from? It comes from this radical, extremist billionaire ideology of creating these new zones where corporations are the government, and that's really the heart of Teal's idea is that corporations and really the wealthy individuals at the top of corporations should be the rulers of society, not democracy, democracy is dangerous because too many people have a vote as Teal wrote in 2009, he said he no longer believed freedom and democracy were compatible. And then in 2010 he made a further point that technology would provide an incredible alternative to politics. What does that mean? Well, we're seeing it in the newspapers, we're seeing it on TV, I mean Silicon Valley using its money to seize power. Do you've studied Peter Tillalot, is he a racist? Oh, he's definitely someone who believes that he's part of a superior race of men. He believes in a social hierarchy of white, wealthy, males over everyone else. The one divergence from the usual hierarchy is that he's gay, right? There's like the hypocrisy built him, but if you look at the people he's supported and funded, Curtis Jarvan, for instance, is this radical fascist blogger who's an overt racist and white supremacist? And I can't imagine that he's so important to Teal because Teal does not share his radically racist beliefs or at least is okay with him, which in my book makes you a racist if you're okay. Totally. With racism so. I've found it fascinating in watching JD Vance's, I hate to say evolutions, I'll say devolution because he's devolving as a human being, but he has an Indian wife and he has four mixed racist children. And every day he and Usha get up and make the world less safe, not only for Usha, but for their four children. And at some point in college, JD Vance had a trans roommate, I believe, that he was very close and very good friends with. I mean, married a woman who was born of immigrants and for all intents and purposes, had a chance of being a normal functioning human being. And now he's saying things in public, like, well, Usha can't help it that she's white or he will refer to his kids as Usha's kids. This is something that is just so bizarre to me that you could actively cultivate a world where you throw your children under the bus. As we all know, the Supreme Court has what's called the Kavanaugh rule. And that means that you can law enforcement, can pull over somebody if they just think they might be, have immigration issues. So meaning you have brown skin, which would be all four of the Vance's children. And so clearly, Vance wasn't at some point a bigot, but now clearly is such a bigot that he can't even advocate for his kids. And is this part of the Peter Till boot camp with mind control over JD Vance? I always say Peter Till queer item because JD Vance was kind of chubby and sloppy and he goes to Silicon Valley and he comes back and he's thin and cut and quaffed and is beard trimmed. I mean, Peter Till has had just incredible influence over JD Vance so much so that he will throw his wife and kids under the bus now publicly every day. The scary thing about JD Vance is that there's not one JD Vance, the multiple JD Vances. This is a person who's had three different names and three different religions and multiple different strong political identities. He is a ruthless ambition wearing a human skin suit. There is nothing there at the core except this desire, this hunger for power, not totally unlike Hitler. And I think he's the most dangerous man in American politics. I don't think there's anything JD Vance would stop at. You know, in 2021, he gave a speech, or actually, in 2021 during an interview on a podcast, he quoted the ideas of Curtis Jarvan specifically the idea that Trump should get reelected and then purge the federal government. And if the justices try to stop him and say it was illegal to purge the federal government, that then the president should challenge the justices to make him follow the law. This is a Yale educated lawyer advising that the president should violate the law and the constitution. I have no doubt JD Vance would do that. So I think JD Vance is problem right now because he's had so many identities. He's made some mistakes along the way. For example, you know, I come from a Catholic background. It's been a lot of time around evangelicals lived in place like Kentucky. You kind of don't want to be a Catholic if you're trying to run for the right wing Republican base. He comes from an evangelical culture, right? He should have stuck with that and he becomes a Catholic, which is already a suspicion against him. And his book, which you recently wrote, is largely an apology to evangelicals for being a Catholic, right? He's sort of like, hey guys, yeah, it's kind of weird, but I'm still like you. And yeah, I think it's weird too. And no Catholic, I know, talks like that about their religion. I mean, I was raised Catholic. I'm no longer Catholic, but I've never heard someone describe the rituals and the traditions of Catholicism like some weird outsider alien. And it's clear he's trying to make it clear to evangelicals. It's not serious. It's not that big a deal. Same thing with his interracial marriage, right? That was another mark. If you're going for the white supremacist right wing vote, that's a problem. And so I think he's trying to restructure his identity. And as with Catholicism, sort of put a distance between himself and his past decisions. But that's really hard to do when it's your family, when it's your children. And so I think in a way, the saving grace here is that his ambition and his willingness to completely change his stripes to suit whatever the situation is has caught up with him in a bad way. And it's resulted in this sort of Frankenstein monster. And I think that while he's gotten as far as he has, and the other problem with JD Vance, he's got, doesn't have a lot of charisma. Every time he opens his mouth, he says awful things. My only fear is that if Trump does not make it through office, or people call for impeachment, which under normal circumstances fine, but you don't want JD Vance in the White House. So any plan that does not involve not having JD Vance take his place is a bad idea. Because he'll declare some kind of emergency, he'll seize power. And I don't think that there's anything JD Vance wouldn't do to pursue this radical ideology of which he is now, the main avatar. That is terrifying. So Trump has created this coalition that includes both the Christian nationalists and the technophascists. And this is where our two books kind of meet. Because mine's a lot about Christian nationalism. What is the common goal in your opinion, Gil, that makes these two groups willing to work together? Power. Power to purge any kind of liberal or democratic ideas from the system. Over time they can't win. The demographics are going to shift. Women and people of color are going to get more power. This is what terrifies them. This is the apocalypse they fear the most. And the only thing they can do is try right now to destroy our system of government and turn it into a theology or a Christophascist network, stay, you name it, right? This is a war on democracy because to Teel's main argument from 2009, too many people have a say. And the only way they can win is by seizing power now and making sure that democracy can no longer be used against them and they don't have the fear that accountability. I think that's what unites them. And there's a lot that divides them, too. For example, evangelicals, even the ones I completely disagree with, I would say they believe in God or at least they believe that they believe in God. The tech guys believe in this computer God that they're trying to build. And so there's a tension there because they don't worship the same God, even though they have the same goal. So even if they were to seize power together, they would soon be at war with each other. And in fact, some evangelical leaders are already called for a holy war against Silicon Valley because they understand that when you listen to what these guys say, a lot of the reason why Silicon Valley wants to kill democracy and seize power is because they believe that they're on the cusp of creating a new God in the form of AI, in the form of some super intelligence that's about to arrive. And this new God will allow them to live forever and to become a multi-planetary species and to harvest the entire universe and to live in this abundant future paradise where they will kind of merge with machines and become these eternal, multi-planetary beings. This is an idea called test screen. transhumanism, extropism, cosmism, rationalism, long-termism, all these weird beliefs in Silicon Valley. And if you look at those ideas, and these are held by the people at the top of AI companies, very billionaires, people believe this stuff, that AI is going to do all these miraculous things. And I think that's a big threat to the evangelicals. And if I had $50 million in a super PAC right now, I'd be running ads in the Bible belt, talking about the transhumanism. Wow. I have read that Silicon Valley has hosted recently some church leaders in the evangelicals to try to wine and dine them as to the technology. Also, terrifyingly, I saw Joe Rogan in the last few months kind of roll out that is AI, the second coming of Christ. And so what concerns me about that is that evangelicals are so easily co-opted. They were co-opted by MAGA. And if you are a Christian, I'm not, but if you are a Christian, and you're a follower of Christ, you would speak out explicitly against the accumulation of wealth. That's something that Christ was very black and white about. And he also was very black and white about overt religiosity. And so the fact that the Republican Party has gotten these evangelicals to go worship money. I explain it in my book is because the prosperity gospel is so familiar to them. But the evangelicals, I don't trust it all, I grew up around them. You lived around them in Kentucky because they're so easily co-opted. And I think that the tech oligarchs would ultimately succeed in getting them to come to their side because how did Putin get them on his side through the National Prayer Breakfast in RA, the gun lobby, through the National Prayer Breakfast. It just seems like, you know, Trump, that Jerry Falwell Jr. is the whole reason that we have Trump as president because he got the evangelicals to go vote for Trump. And I think that the evangelical movement is so broken right now. Like once you keep capitulating to immorality, you're just so broken. You're kind of, oh, fuck it takes over. And I'm terrified that they will form an alliance, the evangelicals and the oligarchs. What do you think? Do you think that's likely? I think that's partly what, I think that's partly what Tills trying to do with his antichrist lecture. But he who stops AI is the antichrist because AI is going to be the thing that delivers us. And it's kind of a reframing of the prosperity gospel too. If you listen to what people like Sam Altman or they say, well, what's going to happen when AI takes all the jobs? We're going to have what Altman calls universal extreme wealth. And everyone's going to get a share of the universal extreme wealth. Right? So this is promising that everyone's just going to get free pie in the sky. Which by the way, sounds a lot like communism or socially. So democratic socialists can't say we should have health care, childcare, housing and food. But Sam Altman and the billionaires can say we're going to have free everything forever, fully automated luxury communism. And why doesn't that freak out the evangelicals? Instead of talking about whatever Hassan Piker said, why aren't we talking about our communist future? By the way, if the future is going to be communist or socialist either way, why are we letting the billionaires manage that project? Why don't we start breaking off a piece right now instead of these future promises? Again, it's like religion when we get to the promised land. If you're good little boys and girls until then and do what we say, you will have everything you want in heaven. So that's what they're trying to do. I don't know if it'll work because the sentiment is pulling too hard right now against billionaire power because people are suffering in the moment. And we already have abundance and they're not sharing it. And so I hope people can wake up, but it's going to take a lot of people speaking out directly on this. And I think highlighting the degree to which these billionaires are not Christian at all. They're worshiping a machine God. And it's the machine God is actually them. There's not some other thing being created. It's their hand in a puppet that they're going to call God. And I think we got to make people aware of that because if people don't know, then they will get sucked into this algorithm. They'll have no other choice because these guys are buying up the media. They're buying up all the social media. All the algorithms information are increasingly going to be controlled by this handful of interconnected snakes. And they're going to be the snake in the tree that's free of knowledge. So yeah, they're recreating the Bible and they don't seem to know it, but they're the bad guys. Right. How much of it is there kind of some insurance for us that all of these guys are clearly delusional narcissists completely detached from reality because they don't live in the real world. It's helicopter to a private plane to a bunker. You know, they have no idea what it's like to go through TSA at an airport, which I think is an important human experience. We all have to do it, right? How much of an insurance policy for us is it that these men potentially could compete and sabotage each other? How willing are they to cooperate with one another? And then how is their jealousy and cattiness as I would assume they're probably is like between Sam Altman and Elon Musk, which has been widely reported on. What do you take what you're taking on that? I think all rich people like all politicians mostly hate each other privately. Some hate each other publicly, but nobody wants to see a rival succeed. And this is even true for writers like you write a book that sell people, some people get mad at you. So I think that yeah, there's a lot of tension. Humans have a hard time getting along, right? There's always going to be tensions and rivalries and problems. And these guys are so ridiculous that in many ways they don't seem to realize all of the history that they haven't read. The reason we have the government we have is because we tried everything else through history, thousands of years of history. We tried tyranny, oligarchy, triumvirance, all these different things. And the system we have as imperfect as it is is an effort to balance out the forces and make sure we avoid these violent gyrations and revolutions that have taken place over and over again in the past. And instead, they're trying to recreate oligarchy and fascism, which never end well. And to me, the amazing thing is that they say all of these things out loud. I didn't have any secret sources or obtain any hidden documents to write my book. They settle this stuff in public. They write it in manifestos and blogs and screens and, you know, six hour long podcast interviews. It was there in plain sight. And I don't think they know how it sounds to most people. Just like the marketing around AI has been, it's going to kill all your jobs. It might even kill all of humanity. Well, even guns in tobacco don't market their products as the thing that's going to kill you. Totally. But AI has been marketed that way because that's what sounds good to investors. Wow, we're creating the apocalypse machine. We're going to kill everybody's job and get really rich. That scares the hell out of normal people. So they're not normal people and they don't listen to anybody. Billionaires don't listen to staffers. They don't listen to PR people. They think they're smarter than everybody else. And so that hubris, I think, could be their downfall. And even if they were to conquer all of us and win, they would be in a big civil war with each other like the old dictators of Rome, right? They'd be trying to kill each other next. They're never going to be happy ever because they need all the power. And when you have all the power, you want all the money. When you have all the money, you want all the power. When you have both, you would live forever. And then you're really screwed. And that's where they mostly are now. These guys think they're going to live forever. They're investing in technologies to extend their lives. And so I think what we're seeing with people like Teal, especially, is this sort of a late life crisis, a reckoning with mortality and the desire to do more to create a religion, to become a nation unto yourself, to seize all power, to possibly arrange yourself to be the anti-Christ. Whatever it is, this is a massive public freak out we're seeing. But I think the saving grace here is it's a very loud alarm for everybody else in the country and in the world. These people have lost their minds. And they are very dangerous. And they're only dangerous because of how much money they have, because they can make us live through their bizarre ideas. And so I think that if we don't use this wake up call productively, we're going to have a lot, this is the future. This is what it's going to be like from here on out. But right now we have a choice. That is terrifying. And I think it's a really important point that you make that all of the stuff is being said openly. And we have a media system that fixates on something, as you mentioned earlier, that Hassan Piker said 10 years ago, or that somebody else might say, that Abdul El Sayad might say, or some other politician, as distractions. And these are really terrifying ideas. And I often say on my podcast that one of the problems with the culture in America is we've worshipped money so much that we attribute attributes to human beings that they haven't earned. One of them is that if somebody is a billionaire, they're genius. We say, Oh, Elon Musk is a genius. And I mean, you can just spend three minutes on his ex-feed or go into YouTube and hear him speak at any point. And he realized that he didn't want to do that. This guy is no Einstein. This guy is not some rocket scientist, even though he wants to be one. And he has the money to hire rocket scientists. He isn't that. And I feel like this ETH rich sentiment is happening so much. At the same time, these guys are so in a bubble. They're so in denial as to how we are viewing them. But then when they talk about it, they're victims. Like I heard Jeff Bezos the other day on an interview. And he said, when you're in the ballot box, you shouldn't vote for the people who are trying to blame everybody else. And I thought, my God, he doesn't realize when he says that, that we're thinking about Trump. He doesn't realize that because he's so in the death star. He is so in it. He thinks we're thinking about the people that are blaming him and his billionaire buddies, how detached from reality he was when he said that. Because to the everyday person, the person who was blaming everybody non-stop 24/7, 365 is this asshole president of ours. They are so obviously divorced from reality of the everyday American. And how much of their wealth and how society continues and the media doesn't really call them out. And he's praised on them as these innovators and these incredible businessman and they're so smart. Enables this toxic, apocalyptic dystopian future that they have for us. I think that mentality that rich people are better than everybody else is a major reason why we're in this position we're in today. And it goes back quite a long time. There's an old Yiddish saying I've become very fond of. If you're rich, you're also smart, handsome, and concing. Because no one tells rich people they're not good at these things and they think they're good at all these things. And this is an old observation, it's not new. And if you look today, a lot of the media, the establishment media revenue is partly dependent on these events where the billionaires come and sit on the stage and announce their things. And so it's all become this one ecosystem where the media are in business with these billionaires. And while they still cover them critically to some degree, there's also a degree to which they protect them and shield them and their status and society is important. A billionaire can go and say anything, oh, we're going to create a civilization on Mars. Scientifically, really not ever going to happen, right? But if a billionaire says it, it can happen. Now, if a democratic socialist or a presidential candidate makes some simple promise about health care, it has to be fact-checked to death and be asked about it and it has to be debated and it has to be attacked on it nonstop. So this asymmetry where rich men are allowed to monopolize the future and come up with any idea they want and no one will call it out as bullshit. But no one else is allowed to do that. And this is rigidly enforced, I would say, by the establishment media in the United States. The billionaires get to decide what reality is and that's largely why we're in this position. And I say in my book, we cannot allow these men to monopolize the future, right? Like I was saying a minute ago, why is it that Sam Altman can promise socialism and no one else can talk about basic necessary ideas to help American families? It's because of this bigoted bias for the billionaire bullshit. And I think a lot of people in the media buy into that and never really question it. And I'm glad that my book's the best seller a lot of people are reading it. But there are also a lot of major media outlets that won't acknowledge this narrative at all, right? They can't say that it's not true, right? Some of the stuff I've written about was mentioned in the New York Times where I called this from different stories. But by and large, the establishment media does not want to acknowledge that the billionaires have lost their fucking minds and we are in grave danger because of that. They are protecting the billionaires. And we have to do something about that. - Yeah, when I hear Bezos and recently I heard Elon Musk talk about we are going to inter and age of abundance and we are going to reduce the work week and everybody's gonna have a guaranteed universal income. I'm thinking, okay, you're famously not philanthropic like famously not philanthropic at all. The ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, Mackenzie Scott, outspins all of them combined on her philanthropic donations. And she does it quietly. She doesn't want her name posted on stuff. She is just constantly helping the marginalized. This notion and this is so important that when you hear a democratic socialist or you hear Azoran Mamdani talk about dignity for working class people, they're called so radical. And if the person who has that message happens to be Muslim, then they're called a jihadist and a terrorist and all of these tropes are piled on them. And recently, anybody who's a Democrat is called a communist. Which my understanding is of that is that the government captures the means of production. Right now, the oligarchs are wanting to do that. They are trying to capture all of the means of production and all of these jobs are gonna go somewhere and it's to their robots, to their AI models and they are going to now capture everybody's wages. So is it safe to say through all of your research in this fabulous book that's a boogie man that Magga and these oligarchs go after is that these immigrants are coming to take your job. That was all a lie, it's always been the billionaires. They want even more wage money, is that correct? - The plan is to suck all the value in the economy up into the hands of the oligarchs. That's their stated plan to use AI to get rid of jobs and then plan for whatever comes after that. So where are we concerned about immigrants? When the plan is to eliminate all jobs or most jobs with AI, except if you're lucky enough to, I don't know, work in security or some other low-level job for the oligarchs. Now, I don't necessarily think that AI is gonna do all of that. That's part of their mythology, but I like to take them at their word and use their words against them. Their whole idea is that they're gonna destroy the entire economy and our entire society in way of life. But that's okay because we'll have some plan to share it after that. But it's ridiculous. Again, it's like this pie in the sky be good and you'll get to heaven mythology because we already have abundance and we're not sharing it. We could have healthcare for everybody if we wanted to. We could have housing for everyone if we wanted to. We can't have it because some people have this moral idea that you have to work for it and you can't get it from the government and the government should be small. But the government should be small, unless it's the billionaire oligarchs, getting multi-billion dollar contracts out of the government, which is what we see happening right now. As the Trump family rakes in all this crypto corruption and makes millions and billions of dollars off of their investments, billions of dollars are flowing into these companies from the Trump administration. It's this sort of circular economy of corruption that they have created. And so big government is fine when it's military industrial surveillance contracts. But not when it's healthcare, when it's food, the richest man in the world cut USAID. - I know. - Right, delivering a targeted hit to the poorest people in the world. And the estimate is that millions will die, including a lot of kids. And so if the idea is that we're eventually gonna have so much abundance that we're gonna share it with everybody, then why aren't we doing that now, right? I think in the future, in their dark vision, we're gonna be the people who need the USAID and we're not gonna get it because we can't trust that a bunch of greedy billionaires who won't share now are gonna become trillionaires and then share. No, they're gonna try to get even richer than that. So I think that's part of the problem. And they know that people are figuring this out to some degree. And to your earlier point about Bezos seeing himself as a victim. Self-victimization, this cult of grievance is often a key element of fascism. We're being victimized, we're in danger because of these people who are against us. And only if we demonize those people and purge them, can we return to our own greatness? And that mentality, that victim mentality, helps to justify whatever the fascist demon necessary that they have to do to survive and to defeat their enemies. So the fascists are always aggrieved. They're the real victims here. Oh, poor Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, can't catch a break. And so how could you sit there and think that way? But again, as you said, they're in this bubble where they're the victims, poor, the ones who are suffering and everyone else is just unfairly criticizing them. But it's important to understand, I think, that mentality is part of their politics. They're afraid of the future if the future involves everybody having to say. Because ultimately, push is going to come to shove. And I think people are going to realize who are real problem is. It's the billionaires. It's not the people picking our food and making sure our society runs. And unfortunately, workers don't buy ads or go to fancy media conferences, so they don't really get a say. But I think that if you look at the polls, and the way that polls are shifting against the administration, and the way people understand that billionaires have way too much power, and the way that communities across the country are rising up against data centers. People are waking up. But we need politicians who speak directly to these problems in a brave and forthright way and challenge billionaire power. Or else, this unrest might be channeled in a different direction, probably by someone like me. it's the banner, and it will not end well for democracy. - I completely agree with all of that. It seems like these billionaires get into a stage of psychosis, and it's like we're gonna exploit, we're gonna take, and then when we call them out for not paying taxes, or we say, "Hey, you have plenty of money, we're gonna tax you five percent," then they're in the state of victimhood, and it just repeats over and over. All right, final question, the title of your book, The Nerd Write, is so brilliant, because I believe that one thing that Democrats or anti-fascist movements need to do is shame these people. They need to be shamed, 'cause they understand that, because underneath the billions of dollars, underneath the titles they have, is profound insecurity, in my opinion. These people are really, really insecure. The president clearly has a lot of these billionaires, and to call them nerds, such a good word, I loved it so much. How did you come up with this title, The Nerd Write, with also kind of the Nazi reference? I think it's so brilliant. - My book started as a five-part series in the New Republic, where I started writing about this extreme ideology in 2024, and I thought this was gonna be a problem for us in five to 10 years, because basically these guys took over city hall in San Francisco, that's where I first became aware of this stuff as a local reporter at the San Francisco Examiner Editor of the Editorial Pages, writing about what was happening there, and I thought there's something deeper going on here, and then I kind of went down the rabbit hole of all these beliefs, and Peter Till was actually behind every single person involved in this stuff. So, my third story that I wrote for the New Republic about this weird network state idea of building these new territories for billionaires to live in after democracy collapses, went super viral on Twitter. And somebody reached out to me from the crypto world, a well-known figure from the crypto world in a DM, and just said, "You know, we've been calling these guys "the nerd Reich for years." And I was like, "Well, what?" And I looked and the URL was available, and I thought, "Wow, so I jumped on it, rebranded again." I just had a little newsletter with like 200 subscribers at the time, and I think it's important to realize that I didn't come up with this name. One of their own peers came up with it. Someone who largely agrees with them on many things, but still thinks they're extreme fascists. It's not a secret behind the scenes who these guys are, and what they want. And so the nerd Reich is a moniker that their own friends called them behind the scenes. And if the jack boot fits, you gotta wear it. - I completely agree, Gil, thank you so much. You guys, please, go order or buy, especially at an independent bookstore, the nerd Reich. This is such important stuff. It's so important that we talk about these psychotic, insecure, fragile billionaires, and how desperately they need to be held to account, Gil, thank you so much. - Thank you. (upbeat music)