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‘They are REALLY, REALLY DUMB’ about some things: Gil Durán EXPOSES Silicon Valley oligarchs

55:18 recording · EN · 2 speakers

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Brief overview

Silicon Valley's richest leaders, organized largely by Peter Thiel, are funding an ideological project against democracy.

  1. The line level never moved; the titans didDuran and Hayes agree tech's workforce stayed broadly center-left while its CEOs went authoritarian.
  2. Thiel is the organizer, not just a donorHe funded Yarvin, built Vance's whole career, and evangelizes on campuses and in salons.
  3. The doom pitch is backfiring on themTelling everyone AI ends all jobs made even non-political people organize against data centers.
Executive Summary AI
  • Chris Hayes frames the episode around a split: rank-and-file tech workers at Google or Palantir still give and vote broadly center-left, while the CEOs and titans have turned sharply right, past the bounds of liberal democracy.
  • Gil Duran, who worked for Senator Feinstein, Jerry Brown, Villaraigosa, Newsom and Harris, recalls that Democrats were once Silicon Valley's best friends: Feinstein helped Tesla take over the old Toyota Numi plant in Fremont, and Brown signed the self-driving car bill at Google in 2011 or 2012 with Sergey Brin standing there in Crocs and Google glasses.
  • Duran dates the turn to 2008 — the first Black president plus the Great Recession made these men see government as inept — then to the 2020 period of Me Too, Black Lives Matter and the pandemic lockdowns, which coincided with the rise of LLMs and crypto and produced Musk as, in his words, the number one right-wing troll in the world.
  • The ideological spine, he argues, runs from 1930s technocracy (Musk's grandfather was a member) to The Sovereign Individual, the 1997 book by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg that predicted AI and crypto would dissolve nation states and hand power to a cognitive elite — a book Thiel cites as a reason he founded PayPal and then popularized across the Valley.
  • Duran traces Thiel's method through Curtis Yarvin, whom Thiel funded, and J.D. Vance, whom Thiel met at Yale Law School in 2011, hired, funded with $15 million in the 2021 Senate race — the largest sum a single individual had then spent on one — and reconciled with Trump after Vance had called him America's Hitler.
Key Quote
“Peter Thiel believes democracy was a big mistake, and he believes it's his destiny to help undo that mistake.”
— Gil Duran
Key Quote
“Peter Teal essentially created J.D. Vance at every step of the way since Yale Law School.”
— Gil Duran
Key Quote
“you literally sound like the bad guy in the movie.”
— Chris Hayes