- Most people cannot fathom just how much money $1 billion actually is.

But today's guest says we also don't understand just how dangerous the extreme political ideas coming from a group of billionaires actually is to American democracy.

He's Gil Duran this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

And my guest this week is Gil Duran, a working journalist and new author whose debut book is "The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley and the War on Democracy."

He's joining us today from San Francisco.

Gil, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thanks for having me.

- I mentioned this to you when we talked previously, but your book scared the heck out of me.

Tell us why you wrote it in the first place.

- I wrote my book because I felt it was important for people to know that what's happening right now in this country is not an accident.

The alignment of Silicon Valley billionaires with the Trump regime is very deliberate.

And my book tells the story of a cult of Silicon Valley billionaires who believe it is their destiny to overthrow democracy in the 21st century using technology.

And it's a book that's largely told in the words of men like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen.

And I though it was important for people to understand that there's an idea here.

And the idea is that democracy is an obsolete software system that's going to be upgraded to something much worse and much more scary in the 21st century.

And I thought it was important to warn people so they could know what's happening and figure out what to do about it.

- As I said, it's a gripping read and frankly, it's a terrifying story.

You're basically describing something that others have called techno-fascism.

What is techno-fascism?

- Well, tech-fascism is like regular old fascism in many respects.

It's a cult of grievance and self-victimization that seeks to return to some mythical form of glory by purging its demonized and hated enemies from the public sphere, using surreal propaganda to create anxiety around things like law and order and race and gender.

And the idea is to merge the corporate powers with state power and to some degree with religion into one unified monopoly of power.

That's how fascism has traditionally worked.

The one thing I would say that makes tech-fascism a bit different is that while fascist movements generally promise a return to a mythically great period, tech fascists promise that if we can only accelerate AI and technology as quickly as possible, we will achieve some kind of godlike power, some kind of post-human transcendence where we will have a mythical future that is basically something, a dystopia out of science fiction.

And we see that alignment behind Trump in this sort of unified crypto AI regime that is also doing some of the worst things in terms of targeting and persecuting immigrants, threatening other countries around the world, cutting off life-saving aid to the poorest children in the world.

And that is what I call the tech fascist bundle.

This cornering by a small group of billionaires are cornering the market on AI, crypto, surveillance, defense technology, at the same time that through the Trump administration, they have achieved massive power and influence over our entire government.

- So I want to get to the stuff in the Trump administration a bit, but I want to stay a little bit sort of at the foundational level trying to understand the phenomena itself.

There are people who for years have just sort of waved their hands at sort of, I don't know, the crazy thoughts coming out of Silicon Valley because it's just a libertarian hotbed and they don't want to pay more taxes.

You make the case really powerfully that it's much more than that.

Why is there such a receptive audience in the folks that you're writing about in "The Nerd Reich" to these kinds of authoritarian arguments?

- I think their wealth, and many of these may have become multi-billionaires in the past few decades, has driven them kind of insane.

There's a problem when you're super wealthy, the money doesn't matter to you as much anymore.

You still want more of it, but now you want something else, some kind of power.

When you have money, you want power.

When you have power, you want money.

When you have both, you want to be Godlike and live forever.

And I think that's the stage at which a lot of these guys have arrived.

In Silicon Valley, it's become normal for people to act like they're going to somehow not die, that they're going to figure out the answer to death, that life can be extended infinitely, none of which is scientific and true.

And so I think we've got this sort of apocalyptic capitalism rising up partly because of AI.

There's this idea that AI is going to transform everything and is going to achieve some kind of godlike intelligence.

Again, there's no evidence to suggest that that's the case, but these people genuinely believe that.

And so instead of just wanting to escape from regulations and taxes, they also want to seize the maximum amount of power so that they can eliminate any rules or regulations to maximize their AI compute.

That's why they're trying to build the data centers everywhere.

And for a long time, people describe these guys as libertarian, especially Peter Thiel is often described as a libertarian.

But Peter Thiel's the co-founder of Palantir, which has been a major government-funded military industrial surveillance contractor since 2003.

You can't really be a libertarian who wants a small, non-intrusive, maybe non-existent government and a military surveillance contractor.

So it never really made any sense, but I think that they understand that most political journalists don't understand these things.

So if you call yourself a libertarian while being a billionaire surveillance contractor for the government, no one's really going to question that.

That's pretty much what happened here.

- Yeah, so it's sort of dizzying to think in terms like this.

I guess the question I want to cut to the chase is the end game that they seek, it's not just really sort of a fundamental change in the way we govern and organize the United States.

It's something greater than that?

- They believe that basically the nation state model where we have nations like the United States, the United Kingdom and others is going to disappear in the 21st century.

And that instead of nations and democracies, we're going to have these little zones that are instead ruled by tech corporations that's been spelled out for decades in many of their blog posts and interviews and speeches.

This idea that the nation state is not long for this world.

The entire global order is going to change in the 21st century.

Peter Thiel in particular was inspired by a 1997 book called "The Sovereign Individual," which predicted in the 21st century technology would destroy the nation state system, specifically something called cyber currency, a new kind of digital money that would undermine government authority and allow wealthy people to exfiltrate their money from government banks.

And the other one, advanced automation, which would kill most jobs, leave workers without anything to do and lead to widespread economic collapse, chaos and violence.

And the idea was that a certain class of savvy investors, the so-called sovereign individuals, could profit off of this collapse and then travel the world through different municipalities and states where they would cater to this new rootless billionaire class who had escaped the destruction of the nation state by investing in it.

And a very apocalyptic book that was very widely panned and poorly reviewed.

But the book had such an influence on Thiel that he has cited it as part of the reason he started PayPal as an effort to get ahead of this new digital currency.

And amazingly, it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We now see AI and crypto as the main tools the Silicon Valley billionaires are using to increase their wealth and power here in 2025 and 2026.

Donald Trump is now a crypto billionaire and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, co-founded an AI company.

So Silicon Valley is merging with the Trump administration.

And as far as I can tell, this is part of this self-fulfilling prophecy.

It doesn't have to be this way.

We could do technology without destroying the country, without destroying most people's livelihoods, but the billionaires don't seem to see it that way.

- So you mentioned this idea of network states.

What I was sort of alarmed to read in your book is that this is not just some crazy musing on a Substack somewhere.

The Trump administration has adopted this approach in a couple of different places.

Tell us about that.

- So the network state is this related idea that, okay, the nation state's going to falter and collapse.

So what will come after that?

These new corporate-run zones, which some call network states.

There's a book called "The Network State: How to Start a New Country."

You can look it up online.

It's free to read.

It spells it all out.

The idea of that is that there's going to be a civil war between the Republicans and the Democrats.

The nation's going to collapse, and this new tech power will rise up to rule over new territories.

These will be called network states, basically privatized billionaire dystopia cities that they will run and control.

And if you're lucky enough to get inside of one, then you'll basically work for them and be subject to their laws and their rules.

And this sounds like crazy talk, but in 2024 in his platform, Trump proposed the creation of 10 new freedom cities, new basically corporate private cities that will be built on federal land after a competition to see who has the best idea for these cities.

He's also proposed building a freedom city on the ruins of Gaza, even tweeted out a video, an AI-generated video of a Trump casino and resort on the beach at Gaza.

When he's threatening to take Greenland, there's a group of tech bros proposing to build a new city there.

They're a new city proposed for Venezuela, for Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

And there's a prototype in Honduras called Prospera, where some billionaires bought a piece of land and have created their own zone with their own rules and laws.

Honduras is trying to kick them out and now they're suing Honduras for $10.8 billion.

So this idea has morphed from this book and from these blogs in Silicon Valley into reality for the Trump administration.

And one of the strangest things is that though Trump had this in his campaign platform.

To this day, no major media outlet has explained what is a Freedom City, why do we need Freedom Cities, and where does the idea come from?

It comes from this "Network State" book.

And by the way, there's a whole venture capital firm now funded by billionaires called Pronomos Capital that is dedicated to building these zones all over the world.

And by the way, they talk about this very openly.

And so the point of me writing my book was to tell people what they're talking about, what they're saying, and how it's starting to manifest in our reality as well, even though a lot of people still don't seem to want to acknowledge it.

- This is the thing, because I think that the danger sometimes in talking about these issues is that we sound almost unhinged, right?

Because some of what they're talking about is so incredible that it's hard to believe that an American in 2026 is actually sort of advocating in favor of some of these things.

But to your point, your source for this are things that they've said at conferences, in publications.

There's an actual written record, not some secret archive somewhere that you had to get access to.

- Yeah, you can go on YouTube right now and look up the Network State Conference.

Every year they have a conference where for eight to 10 hours straight, they talk about this new world that's coming.

They talk about projects they're funding, about how Bitcoin is going to replace the dollar, about how network states are going to replace nation states, the United States is going to collapse.

And these aren't just a handful of kooks.

These are some very wealthy people, most of them with connections to Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen and other high ranking billionaires in Silicon Valley who are also the exact same billionaires who are most supporting Trump right now.

And so I felt it was important for people to know what this conversation is because I think the weirdness and the extreme radical ideas are a kind of cloaking device in a way.

Many of the mainstream media avoid these things because they seem weird or conspiratorial, right?

But it's not a theory if they're saying it.

It's not a theory if they're writing it down and it's certainly not a theory if we see it happen.

For example, crypto, which very few Americans use and which has no legitimate purpose except for gambling and crime has now become the biggest player in American politics pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into our elections, even though very few people use it.

Trump has now become a crypto billionaire and crypto has basically become this weapon of mass corruption in our politics.

And no one has explained really why is this happening?

Why is crypto spending more than any other economic sector to take control of Washington and to basically hold a gun to the head of democracy?

Anybody who votes against crypto can have tens of millions of dollars thrown against them.

So this crypto thing is another thing they talk about, crypto becoming the new power in the world.

Remember that 1997 book said crypto would undermine government authority.

Instead, it's buying government influence in order to undermine government power.

And so I think once you see the things they're saying and you look around, you see that these are also the things they are doing.

- Yeah, and so do we have to view Elon Musk's foray into the federal government in the start of the second Trump administration as part of that ideology?

- Oh, more than that, it was part of a plan that was spelled out 15 years earlier by a radical extremist anti-American blogger named Curtis Yarvin.

Curtis Yarvin, a computer programmer from San Francisco, argued for years on the internet that the United States should be replaced by a dictatorship, that democracy was a stupid system, that United States should have lost the Revolutionary War, we should still have a king or a monarch.

And these ideas got popularized among the bloggers and the internet culture in Silicon Valley.

But one of Yarvin's ideas was that a future president acting as a dictator should install a CEO to purge the federal government of any liberals or people who believe in democracy and install only loyalists who would then carry out his plans.

And that's pretty much what we saw Elon Musk do with DOGE.

In fact, Yarvin called his plan RAGE, retire all government employees.

Elon changed it to DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, or as I prefer to call it, destruction of government by Elon.

And it may seem odd to make that connection, but "The Washington Post" even wrote about this and the people inside of DOGE had all read Curtis Yarvin and agreed that that was basically what they were doing.

And so the important thing to understand about Yarvin is that he's been mostly funded and promoted by Peter Thiel, right?

So these billionaires take these crazy ideas and because of their money, they have the power to turn these blog posts into policy.

And that's very much what we're seeing right now here in the Trump administration.

The good news is that they're pretty inept at it.

DOGE collapsed.

Elon Musk's ego was too big for Washington, but they've done a tremendous amount of damage and we don't even know everything they're doing or have done, so we don't know yet what the full scope of that damage will be.

- Are the attacks on higher ed part of that same dynamic?

- Oh, absolutely.

Fascism always goes after academia and intellectuals because they don't want anybody around who can explain what is happening, explain how it fits into history and say exactly what it is.

What they have in mind is what they call a parallel system.

This is what they call it in their blog posts and their literature and their speeches.

The idea is you take existing institutions, be they media, academic, political, social, religious, and you replace them with new versions that serve their interests, serve their purposes.

Barry Weiss, who's now the head of CBS, tried to start her own university, the University of Austin, to be this sort of anti-woke university, which meant it was mostly right-wing schlock and it's sort of fallen apart since then.

But the idea is you're going to create new institutions to rival Harvard, to rival "The New York Times," that way you control the narrative because they feel that reality is too liberal, the facts are too liberal.

So they want to create their own facts, their own academia.

It ends up not working.

I mean, it's been a disaster at CBS since Barry Weiss knows nothing about television and has mostly pushed out real journalists to bring in right-wing commentators.

But this is very much the idea is that you can't have institutions that don't agree with the right-wing politics.

Yarvin, the blogger, calls it the cathedral, this series of institutions that uphold liberal democracy and calls for scrapping it and then replacing it with something that is essentially a fascist propaganda machine.

- I'm a historian by training, and one of the things that strikes me is that over time, autocrats of all different kinds have grossly underestimated the attractive power both of democracy, but also of nationalism.

And so that goes back to the French Revolution, right?

So are these billionaires that you're writing about, are the acolytes around them, are they so seduced by their own thinking that they are just dismissive of those forces in history or do they think that they're going to just sort of power through that just by the power of their arguments or the power of their wealth?

- They're definitely high on their own supply.

And billionaires are really stupid about things that they don't know about, but no one ever tells a billionaire they're stupid or don't know about something, right?

I mean, the Trump regime is largely failing.

It's super unpopular.

This would be a lot more scary if this was popular.

And when they took over, I assume maybe they have a plan using propaganda or whatever to make this all seem good and exciting and to drive down prices artificially into what if like 70% of the people agreed with what was going on, but that's not what is happening.

So I think they're in a bit over their head.

They don't understand how regular people think.

And so that's a big liability in politics where you really have to be attuned to the voter mentality.

And that means you have to understand what it's like to be a normal person.

You have to know the prices of different groceries, what rent costs, what the struggles are of average people.

And nowhere is this billionaire psychosis and stupidity more apparent than in the conversation around AI.

The AI moguls have driven this narrative that AI is going to kill all of our jobs and potentially wipe humanity off the face of the planet.

This is terrifying to most people, and this is why there's such a massive protest everywhere against these data centers and why people don't like AI and don't trust AI.

So why would you ever market a product as being this ultimate job killer?

In American politics, you always promise to create more jobs, you always promise to make families safer and more secure, and you always promise that the future is going to be better.

These guys did the opposite and now they're in big trouble because everybody hates AI.

And there was a recent poll that showed that young people despise the AI CEOs.

So thank heavens they do not understand politics 101 and basic messaging because it would be a lot more scary if they did.

However, they learned from their mistakes and they're now hiring democratic operatives to help shape their narratives because they realize they've lost the people here.

- When you write about this stuff, there is such a compelling quality to your reporting on it.

Have you talked to any of the billionaires themselves in your reporting on this and what have you heard from them?

- I tried to.

None of them would call me back.

(Jim laughing) Fortunately, they talk so much that I didn't really need them.

I would have been willing to talk to Peter Thiel.

I still am willing to talk to Peter if you're listening, because I want to understand this more.

I want to hear their defense of these ideas.

I even waited at the back of a... Peter Thiel's been giving these lectures on the antichrist.

He gave one in San Francisco and I waited at the back door for hours trying to see if I could catch him and just... So I definitely made an effort, but they prefer to talk to audiences that agree with them.

They're not looking for a debate.

They're not looking for pushback.

None of these guys would last three seconds on the stage with an academic or someone who actually understands politics and history.

And that's part of the problem is that they live in these bubbles and they get these feedback loops where they're surrounded by young people who want their money, who are seeking investment and who are willing to nod along with whatever crazy thing is going on.

There was a line of people to see Thiel's antichrist lecture in San Francisco, and none of them were there for religious purposes.

They all just wanted to be in the room with a billionaire and pitch their ideas.

So that's the allure of the billionaire.

That's how you build a cult around you, is that people want your money and they're willing to go along with whatever crazy thing you say in order to get closer to you.

- Well, you mentioned that he's been doing this lectures really all over the world about the antichrist.

He also named his company Palantir, which is a Tolkien reference to the seeing stones used by a dark wizard.

And sometimes in reading this, I kept thinking we've lost the plot and some of these folks just don't understand who the bad guys are in history.

- Or they do.

Thiel has a strange ability to kind of say exactly what he's doing in the most reversed way possible.

For example, Palantir, right, you literally named your company after this tool that's used in "The Lord of the Rings" to hunt down the hobbits by an evil wizard who seeks to destroy the world and claim it for evil.

Now, Thiel rejects that and says, "Well, in another book, Aragorn uses it for good," but that's not the story most of us know, right?

The Palantir is used by the evil wizard in "The Lord of the Rings."

Same thing with the antichrist speeches.

Thiels describes an antichrist who will warn the world of apocalyptic dangers in order to seize technological power and institute a one world government, which sounds a lot like what Silicon Valley's up to these days with all this apocalyptic talk about how AI is going to destroy everything.

And when he talks about the antichrist, he describes Silicon Valley and he describes himself while blaming other people like Greta Thunberg and AOC and others who he claims might be the antichrist.

But the weirdest thing about it is that there's no reason why Peter Thiel should be traveling the globe at the height of his influence and power preaching about the antichrist.

He's not a theologian.

In fact, theologians have rejected his do-it-yourself theology, and yet he's doing this, right?

Because the billionaires really don't understand how the world works and how weird it looks to have you roaming the earth preaching antichrist at this particular moment in time.

Very dangerous stuff.

- So I've got literally two minutes left here and I got a lot more that I want to ask you about, but the thing that I want to focus on, we talked about the sort of the lowercase D democracy and the pushback there, but I'm curious about whether or not you think our public institutions are strong enough to defend the cathedral as it were.

And I think in asking that question, I also have to ask you about J.D.

Vance.

We've got like 90 seconds.

- Our institutions are definitely being tested and some of them are standing up to that test.

We've seen some brave judges, some brave legal teams that are pushing back against this and winning.

And we also see voters starting to reject this in the elections we've had the past two years rejecting this right-wing politics even when Elon pours his money in.

J.D.

Vance, the most important thing to understand about J.D.

Vance is he's almost entirely a creation of Peter Thiel.

At every step of his career, he's been funded and promoted by Thiel.

He became a venture capitalist, a politician, a Catholic, and vice president because of Thiel.

And he embraces these radical ideas.

He's quoted Curtis Yarvin, this guy I mentioned, the blogger with the radical ideas, and no one ever asks Vance about his connection to this extremism, and I think that's a big mistake.

- What can we as citizens do?

- We need to become aware of what's exactly happening, and we need to tell people that this is not an accident, this is not happenstance, this is not a coincidence.

The billionaires have been talking about this for a long time.

They have a very specific idea and they're carrying it out.

When you read the news, they're doing it.

Crypto, AI, power, surveillance.

This is the dystopia they want to replace our democracy with.

- Gil Duran, the book is "The Nerd Reich."

It is an important read.

That is all the time we have this week, but if you want to know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit salve.edu/pellcenter where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

And I want to thank you too for sharing some of your week with me.

I'm Jim Ludas from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University asking you to join me again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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