The powerful tech baron seeking to 'ethnically cleanse' San Francisco

if I were writing this as a science fiction novel it would seem unbelievable but this is apparently a real thing hi welcome to power user I'm Taylor Loren and this week we are doing a deep dive on one of the most infamous yet lesser known figures of Silicon Valley maybe you could literally have like The Sovereign city of San Francisco and secede effectively or or something like that if you have true total gray control the city maybe right and now you start rolling up about that worked there and then it works elsewhere that's BAGI Serena Vasan a powerful sentim millionaire who wants to transform San Francisco into a militant Tech dystopia he's ranted about the media progressivism encourag the doxing of journalists from quote unquote vulnerable groups and the most powerful people in Silicon Valley including Elon Musk venture capitalist Mark andrees and CEO of the startup accelerator y combinator Gary tan are all huge fans of his my guest today is gild Duran who reports on Tech Fascism and billionaire extremism he wrote a fantastic piece about bology recently for the new Republic thanks so much for joining us Gil thanks for having me as somebody that covers Tech I have to say I don't even cover Silicon Valley but bology is so inescapable he's become this figure online I feel like where we keep hearing about him where did he come from where did he grow up and what's his backstory well as far as I can tell he comes from Long Island I didn't really dig much into his childhood or where he grew up but then he seems to have spent a long period of time at Stanford University where he got a ba and Ma and a PhD before emerging into the usual kind of startup world of you know the post Stanford life being a venture capitalist starting different companies and it seems like for the most part he was just your usual everyday centa millionaire at a young age type of VC people who come out of Stanford and have some idea that seems very obscure to the rest of us but is worth a lot of money to people who have money to invest and I think he first kind of comes on the radar as a thinker as a person with a philosophy or a movement he's pushing in 2013 when the New York Times ran a story by a non jadtis about a speech that Balaji gave at Y combinator and in that speech he depicted the United States as sort of an outdated company like Microsoft and saw a kind of post American post democracy War world that would be ruled very differently than what we have today we're going to talk about today is uh something I'm calling um silicon Valley's ultimate exit what do I mean by silicon Valley's ultimate exit it basically means build an opt in society ultimately outside the US run by technology so this kind of puts him on the map this 2013 speech I think also I mean you mentioned this in your story too but to me it also seems like the rise of crypto really accelerated his prominence he was really early into the crypto world world and I feel like developed this big online audience because of that and as crypto values were sort of rising throughout the 2010s and I feel like he became more well known was he also at andrees Horowitz for a minute yeah he was a partner at andreon Horowitz for a while then went to coinbase as CEO did seem to make a lot of money in crypto and then about a year or two ago he got kind of worldwide notoriety for making a million dooll public bet uh that crypto would surge past a a big point it didn't happen so he paid the million doll bet but clearly has a a lot of money a lot of wealth and has become increasingly strident about his belief that there's going to be a post- democracy order and that tech people have to now plan to be the ones who rule in that post democracy order yeah it seems like the tech World especially the Silicon Valley Tech world has gotten increasingly authoritarian in the past couple years and you've done such a great job covering this but it seems like a lot of these figures Mark Anderson being one of them Peter teal obviously and other billionaires Tech billionares have really moved to the far right they seem to kind of want this Tech driven authoritarianism bology has talked about something called the network State can you kind of explain what that is and what his political philosophy is sure well according to bology in his book the network state which is free to read online uh in one sentence a network state is a highly aligned Community with a capacity for Collective action that crowds funds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing States put even more simply the billionaires create their own countries and Rule their own countries and we see some efforts to do that all around the world including here in Northern California and that's what really got my interest I wasn't paying attention to these things I I I was a vague noise I Do cover though San Francisco politics which is a place where suddenly all these venture capitalist white combinator folks are making a huge surge to really seize power to seize control of City Hall in the next election and this sort of started bubbling up slowly a few years ago but now it's become like a full mask off movement and this is what really got my attention because it felt to me that they're writing books about this stuff and they have a whole philosophy behind it but no one reading a newspaper in the Bay Area would have any idea of that it's all a very superficial story about you know Tech moderates getting involved and I felt someone had to say the quiet part loud as bology does and say this is actually about a bigger idea and they're doing it all over the world and it's not moderate it's it seems like not a very moderate idea at all it seems pretty extreme I mean bolog talked about tech Zionism is that sort of part of this network State philosophy yeah well there are two main ideas in the network State one is you create a entirely new city that you govern hopefully located in a country where the government's kind of weak or corruptible so you can buy Independence or sovereignty we saw them they've tried this in Honduras a town called prospera that they built they're trying to build something called prais in the Mediterranean um there's a project here in Northern California called California forever that's in an effort by a lot of these same bellagi connected people to create a new city here so one of them is create your own country create your own territory ruling a city or a state the idea biology favors less is you take over existing governments through election this is called voice so creating your own country is called exit in the lingo of the network State and voice is when you stay and you fight and you take over government and that's what we see Gary tan why combinator trying to do right now in San Francisco which is take over the city and in a podcast in September a six-h hour long podcast cut into two segments I might say oh god um biy laid out a vision of a future San Francisco in which Tech align citizens adopt Gray forms t-shirts with uh Tech logos like Elon or white combinator or what have you and they buy up and take over entire blocks of the city and the blues those are the Democrats the Grays or the techine citizens are kept out of the gray areas they're pushed out Blues who live in the same city in San Francisco don't share your values they're a different tribe right they want to get paid by the government to get poor people addicted to drugs they want chaos and poop on the the streets to stick a thumb into the eye of these Tech guys they want to ban self-driving cars but allow car break-ins right um they basically Blues don't share gray values the Grays the tech Aline citizens also bribe the police department with Banquets and jobs for their relatives to serve the tech aligned Grays and the police and the gray once they have amassed enough power and prominence will March through the streets in a gray pride parade with Ander drones flying overhead and the police marching shoulder-to-shoulder with the Grays I mean like a huge win would be a gray pride parade with 50,000 Grays that would be massive that would start to say who streets our streets right you have the AI Flying Spaghetti Monster you have the Bitcoin parade you have the drones flying overhead and formation with you know whatever song you want right now this is a pretty nightmarish authoritarian so dystopian yeah that sounds like a Black Mirror episode you shouldn't even say that kind of thing at a bar much less on a 6-hour podcast that's posted on YouTube so I took a big interest in that because a month after the podcast appearance biy holds something called the network State Conference in which all kinds of normal seeming tech people went to Amsterdam to speak about their own parts of the project that they're trying to build all over the world including in San Francisco where Tech align groups are now trying to create a one square mile zone of the city that is Tech dominated they're calling it City Campus and lo and behold I discovered one of the investors and one of the companies pushing for this is biology sason so these are some pretty insane ideas pretty nightmarish and and crazy and I just feel that people should know that this is something being talked about proposed and there's a vision here that goes beyond just clean streets and a sense of community yeah no I mean it's so dark um we mentioned actually previously on the podcast this idea of a City Campus and some of it sounds very idealistic right like this community care and everybody living together working together maybe shared resources like that all sounds actually quite Progressive and positive maybe for people looking to kind of build community in San Francisco but this sounds like almost like the Bizarro World negative version of it how much traction are these ideas getting in San Francisco politics well I think we're going to see that in November there was a recall of the district attorney and some members of the school board two years ago and a lot of that was funded by people like David Sachs another right-wing Tech figure Gary tan thre in $100,000 but I don't think at that point they had made so clear their ultimate goal and so I think uh we'll see the mayor's race is going to be very tight and there are two Tech supported right leaning candidates who have a chance of winning or at least candidates who used to be Democrats but now are willing to sort of talk tough and act Republican because that's where the tech money is Flowing I think they'll have a harder time capturing the Board of Supervisors because San Francisco is pretty Progressive there's been a long-standing tension between the people who live here the people who are artists the people who are struggling to make a a living and keep San Francisco as has traditionally been and the influx of tech people who are new to town and try to change things around you know the it's kind of um what they're proposing now there's always been a degree of gentrification taking place because of tech but it sort of G ification on steroids and at the speed of AI uh is what they seem to be envisioning and I think they'll have a harder time with that because I think that's how people even if you could strip away all of the authoritarian Twilight Zone stuff that biology talks about people still have a really hard time with an outside force coming in and trying to buy up neighborhoods that already exist there's already Community here right when I first moved to the Bay Area I lived in a communal housing it was a former frat house where we shared a bathroom and a kitchen because it was cheap I'm still in touch with those people I just ran into one of their kids last night at a bar randomly who haven't seen since they were a baby there's a thing called community and exists there's a thing called getting out of college and having to share housing until you can afford to get your own place a lot of us ended up in the outer Mission or the East Bay because it was too expensive in noi Valley so they seem to be rediscovering that wow there are some really expensive popular neighborhoods and we just have to buy them up and make them a Tech campus and I don't think you really build community by excluding people who are not working in the same industry the same company that you are so again like we see with many things they're trying to reinvent things that already exist but in a pretty horrible and nonsensical way yeah and super like just hyper capitalist of just pledging your loyalty to a corporation which by the way these tech companies do layoffs constantly I guess what happens if you're a gray and you get laid off by meta I mean you just get cast out of the the tech the you know I don't know cast out of your neighborhood yeah if you don't make it up into the VC range if you're just you know a lot of people and I want to make it clear I I love Tech I've Got Friends in Tech I use Tech all the time we're surrounded by I don't think Tech is inherently bad I think what's happening is that some people are getting too rich and getting off way into a Bizarro land of of where they think that Society needs to go uh the plan seems to be that if they are able to capture enough power in San Francisco you're just going to push out all the poor and push out all the problems to somewhere else and call that uh success and that's not really going to solve the problem and it's really weird to me that these are problems of poverty and the more billionaires and ctim millionaires we have the more poverty we seem to have and their only solution seems to be to you know put on Gray uniforms and March with the police and keep everybody out that's uh if I were writing this as a science fiction novel it would seem unbelievable but this is apparently a real thing yeah let's talk about the this movement's relationship to the police because I feel like there's been this sort of tight alignment between this ideology and this kind of goal for a police state um they're very Pro police I think when you mentioned the recall of Chessa Budin I remember one big critique was like oh you know he wants to defund the police or whatever I think crime had actually gone down that year in San Francisco but why is this movement so tightly aligned with the police and you know is there evidence that the police are I guess amable to this Vision we do gray red dual meetups policemen's benevolent Union okay all of the police who are Gra sympathetic in the city should come to and you have to go and look at the legalities of this and so on and so forth because blue will be trying to attack this with law fair the entire time I think in any political context when people bring a lot of money they're going to make a lot of friends I'm actually writing a piece right now about whether the Democrats who've aligned with tech are really de are really moderate Democrats or whether they've become more like baji gray tribe because they certainly are sounding like Republicans and even opposing criminal justice forms that were supported by Major police groups and are still supported by Gavin Nome and Rob bonto who are pretty mainstream Democrats who are not considered farle in California uh you also see a Nexus with the technology things like paler andal there's this whole you know the surveillance AI stuff that they're pitching as a solution to Crime uh there's a billionaire who funded his entire an entire network of surveillance cameras in San Francisco so I think you do see an alignment there they seem to think that because crime has been perceived as a growing problem here that that's a good place to exploit for maximum political effect right if we just create more polarization and anger in align with the police the problem is as someone who spent 15 years in politics working for Big City Mayors like Jerry Brown like Antonio verosa like Dan Feinstein we tried all this tough on crime stuff before and we tried putting maximum numbers of people in prison and it created more crime we learned a lot in the Decades of that so what scares me about their alignment with these tough on crime police alliances is that for all of their supposed intelligence and access to Ai and the best thinking all they're pushing are retrograde policies that we already know will fail you can do short-term suppression by flooding the streets and going after Parolees or whatever but over the long term that doesn't solve the problem and you don't hear them talking about a long-term solution so while they may have zillions of dollars in done something brilliant in some computer code or crypto they're idiots compared to someone like me who knows these I was 20 years ago I was working on these problems and you know what 20 years ago I thought maybe tough on crime would do it and that it was a moral imperative and so you learn things in life and I think a big problem with these folks is that they and this is not unusual people with a certain amount of wealth start to think they know everything and that they're smart about everything and they're not so it's not clear what the end game is even if they were to seize up all the power in the city uh I don't think in 5 years you have a situation where there's no crime because Tech was just that smart I mean most of them don't even live in San Francisco that's the irony is they live in these rich suburbs and and maybe only go into the City for meetings and they live in many places and so it's weird that they've decided to focus and Gary tan of white combinator has this whole line that oh startups fail if they're not in San Francisco we have to be here absurd yeah even if you strip away all of the again the weird goly G of biology I think you would still have a story about a plan to take all this wealth that's in the cloud or that's in volatile crypto and buy real estate which is got lasting and growing value and with real estate comes power political power power on the land once you start buying those buildings Gray is now win or die they need to win see actually historically guys who've held local real estate have been influential in local politics for that exact reason they don't have exit they must win local politics so turning gray into land owners going from the cloud down to land it's sort of like Israel itself right they went from Scholars and Merchants to Farmers and soldiers they actually descended from the cloud onto the land and built a modern country this is a workable strategy and bology spells all of this out too in it and so anybody knows that the the price of property right now in San Francisco especially commercial buildings is lower than it's been in a long time because of the supposed Doom Loop uh and so this idea to crowdfund and go into the property and landlording business at a massive scale both using uh billionaire VC wealth and crowdfunding from all these young people who want to be a part of something and think they're going to get to the top as well uh is probably what they think of people like you know Brian Armstrong of coinbase and novel ravikant and uh andreon think of biology as a genius because he spelled out with got to take the money out of the cloud to The Land by real estate which is the lasting asset and with it political power to start changing things to the way we want them and so I think that's an important part to keep in mind it might be superficial enough for the general press to to grasp yeah how did this Narrative of America being an obstacle to Silicon Valley come to fruition well I think it's a massive lack of gratitude these are folks who at a certain point forget that it's this country and it's our Collective investment in this country that makes all this success possible in the United States and in this way it's very much like the old school Republican uh well I did it myself I pulled myself up by my bootstraps yes they all bootstrapped their billion doll companies you know 100% not like it was a massive transfer of wealth from other VCS I mean it's the irony is that so many of these tech companies are VC backed themselves totally and you know this country has become a Haven for these kinds of companies and Creations because of what we built here that's it's a collective thing but they realize wait I've got all this money now I don't want to pay taxes I don't want to get prosecuted by the SEC if I did something wrong well we should just create a place where I don't have to pay taxes and where there is no SEC and wherever I can get away with anything is is the law and so in that way there this emerging ideology resembles old school Republican ideology of no taxes no regulations but uh instead of putting sort of religion or or God at the top of the hierarchy it's really about tech and Founders being at the top and if a specific type of founder because I feel like this group especially led by bology and andreon and all of the David Sachs right it's like they've almost gotten more extreme I it seems to me like they want to hold control like they want to maintain control over the tech landscape and so that's why they're so focused on backing these like San Francisco Founders and the specific sort of like Cult of young men that worship them yeah definitely I use the word cult a lot there's a lot that doesn't really make sense with what they're proposing it's like get outside of your circle talk to real people meet people who are not wealthy see what their problems are you know get out of the bubble they seem to be really in a self reinforcing bubble and to really view themselves as Superior and headed towards some kind of History making epic defining greatness I'm not really sure that's going to be the case some of their political efforts here in San Francisco are floundering they seem to get some kind of lowquality characters who have a lot of problems and everything blows up and gets disor organized uh there's some you know problems brewing for some of they they've created a bunch of little political organizations in San Francisco and those have been having some big trouble in the Press recently so I I take them seriously because they do have enough money to be very dangerous for a long time but at the same time when I go around the baray area I think it's really hard to get all these individual people to go along with your weird thing because they're going to catch on to what you're doing and I think there's going to be a pendulum swing the other way at some point yeah but in order to catch on to what they're doing I feel like you need a critical press and that's one thing that bology especially has sought to dismantle I mean there was that great Cade Mets story in the times a couple years ago where he you know got that email where bologi is talking about doxing unfriendly journalists um biology has led a doxing campaign against me many other women in the tech world and journalists and stuff can you talk about this movement's relationship to the Press cuz it seems like they're very heavy on alternative media David saaks obviously has his you know this Tech podcast that he's part of now called the all-in podcast that I think puts out a lot of this messaging what is this movement's relationship to the media and why are they so hostile to the Press well again and go back to the words of bology he spells it out in the six-hour podcast he goes on an extended rant against Ida Tarbell a muck breing journalist who's been dead since 1944 what did Ida Tarbell do Ida Tarbell Expos the Monopoly and the corrupt practice IES of the Standard Oil company and resulted in the breakup of the Standard Oil company and resulted in laws that created the SEC the the terror of a lot of these Tech folks the the the dreaded SEC Ida Tarbell she doggedly pursued Rockefeller and demagogued him and the rise of quote what we called mainstream media out of yellow journalism the neutral seeming media this is how they busted the trusts and this is how they built the consensus for essentially you know later you know regulated industry and so the Press is there to witness to expose and balance out the power between these oligarchs and plutocrats and the people and to be a watchu for democracy and part of the network State idea in addition to building your own currencies and cities and states and countries is to build your own parallel media and political organizations and so they really favor AV verion of media that most of us would consider disinformation or lap dog media only positive things that they want put out basically a press release with the by line is the idea of that and often or or an attack on the people they don't like because while they don't like the Press being critical of them or they love it if the Press goes on the attack against a progressive politician or so one it's a oneway then they then they'll share all the New York Times stories in the world if if you know they're critical of progressives totally and and uh it's clear people have always wanted that sort of thing but there's been a real concerted attack and I wrote about this in my piece for the new Republic on journalists here like young journalists getting piled on or picked on by Gary tan just constantly chiseling away at the media trying to make it seem like it's not credible or no longer reporting the news and I mean the chronicle been here since what the Civil War uh so this is a paper with a long established record in this town uh there's a new publication the standard which is by Michael Moritz a tech billionaire and they even attack the standard although most progressives consider the standard to be very Pro Tech the standard has real journalists doing real stories and sometimes those stories are critical of tech people or not attacking a progressive and they get very upset by anything that appears to be uh Fair critical coverage and so sadly as you know the media is being hollowed out the newspapers are not what they used to be and so even as the revenue has been Ed out of Journalism by these massive tech companies there's now an attack from the top on The credibility of these companies and it seems to me that the newspapers largely want to stay out of it and I don't really think they can well exactly I think these newspapers I actually just think they don't know what's coming for them I mean I am just remembering when I was at the New York Times andology was coming after me they're just so woefully underprepared I think the tech people my editor they amazing uh Tech editor that I had of course understands who bology is I think that the people at the top of these news organizations are completely in the dark or they're somewhat you know they share maybe a similar political ideology that actually aligns with him because these are also billionaires and rich people that run a lot of these mainstream news organizations I find it very ironic that baly loves to Champion what he calls citizen journalism um but he doesn't actually support any independent journalists doing real work as you mentioned he kind of likes to Champion these like disinformation agents basically people reprinting whatever talking points he's trying to push whether or not they're factual definitely he definitely came after me after I wrote the piece I saw that can you talk a little bit about the reaction sure at first he reacted by saying you know he had been ethnically cleansed out of San Francisco then he issued this massive essay that accused me of working for the Democratic party which is hilarious because anybody who's read my stories knows I'm someone who worked for the Democratic party who became a Critic of the democratic party albeit also a Critic of the Republican party so not one of these weirdos who goes from being a Democrat to being a suddenly can't say anything bad about Trump but has a lot to say about KLA Harris so I've been very a journalist seeing both sides in California we have all Democratic governance so you have to criticize Democrats here um said um that I was the new Steven glass that I had falsified information without really going into detail on that and said I had been fired from my job at the examiner which which is completely not true and then after accusing me of being paid by the Democrats quoted a piece I wrote for the New York Times criticizing the Democrats so my response was Bashi if that's true if I'm being paid by the Democrats how am I you're also quoting what I wrote for the New York Times very critical of the Democrats so it was it was not meant to convince anybody rational it was only for his audience and all these little blue checks came on the attack uh someone threaten to suggest that I might be Peter teal without due process whatever that means sounds kind of scary But ultimately it was a lot smaller than I expected it was you know a day and a half a few hundred people Elon did not jump in it was clear he wanted Elon to jump in uh and retweet you're lucky about that I will say mine went on for about a year um and still get you know crazy people coming I mean yeah and that's the idea is to bully and silence you it's like is it worth it right to take it on well yeah and I think that this move M as well often goes against women and young journalists as well I mean I've seen them attack sort of reporters that are just starting out really trying to cut off their um cut off their career opportunities um to report critically on Tech I was talking to a young female journalist in her 20s recently about sort of some of these efforts can you talk a little bit more about the vision for the future that these people have you know if they were able to successfully take control of San Francisco through real estate purchases and alternative media and political power What would life be like for the residents that are currently there who are not billionaires well it sounds like they want to create a gated City where a lot of the people who are not billionaires or Tech aligned would not really be allowed but that hinges on using the police is this Force to align with tech and keep them out and there are laws and there are rules and there are a lot of reasons why that wouldn't work in the world we have today now if we have some authoritarian second Trump era that we can't yet foresee or plan for they you know with with a supreme court that'll rubber stamp anything maybe that's the world they're planning for but I think you'll see a lot of push back from people the idea that San Francisco isn't already largely a Zone owned by very wealthy and privileged people where the poor are not allowed in certain areas is kind of ridiculous uh if you've ever been to Pacific Heights the precidio there's a lot of wealth here there's a lot of people who are already have done that but again they're they're using as a recruitment tool for these young people to buy into this kind of cultish idea and to maybe buy into crowdfunding this you know property accumulation so if they get their way the future is very scary and dark but I think they underestimate the level of resistance that they'll receive here in the Bay Area I don't think people are really going to tolerate that and I think people just don't know yet about some of these ideas well I think also because these ideas are not covered very consistently I mean when you and so I think that um the more people find out the more they will be uh shocked and dismayed by this and I think one place to look at Solano County where this group called California forever back by Andre and several other billionaires with ties in links to biology is trying to create a new city it's been depicted in the media as a tech Utopia they want to build from scratch in the middle of Farmland that they they snuck around for 5 years spending $900 million to buy up like 60,000 acres of land and then the New York Times finally outed them as this group of billionaires trying to do this and the reaction from the voters of Solano County who have to approve the project for it to go forward has really been amazing and has given me a lot of hope they see right through it they are absolutely opposed to it polls show 70% of Voters will vote against this thing in the fall and I've been watching their online groups and Facebook groups and they're on top of everything so much so that the California forever has had to close all of its Facebook comments has canceled on public forums their entire strategy consists of getting supposedly real Solano people to give a testimony of why they support it and then the opponents go and dig up that person's connected to this real estate company so basically they can't get anybody who's not connected to some real estate concern to uh say positive things about it and this is United Republicans and Democrats in 2024 yeah and I love that and I think that that is such a positive example of push back I don't think that you will necessarily see that on a wider scale I guess I'm more cynical about this because I've seen this movement go from extremely Fringe to increasingly powerful and increasingly mainstream and gain more followers and more popularity and more wealth and I do think that we're seeing a marked effect you know not just getting the da recalled but like you mentioned there's just there's these political candidates Democrats who were previously very liberal I mean Silicon Valley used to be this Bastion of liberalism are now leaning further and further to the right yeah I think the most dangerous thing in politics is when people decide to remain quiet and we saw this back in January when Gary tan the head of white combinator tweeted Die slow at seven Progressive supervisors and this caused a major uproar obviously from the progressive supervisors from people in the community but there were some politicians from the mayor on down who normally if this had been a progressive saying it or someone else would have said something there was a tremendous amount of Silence from people when tan did something completely outrageous and unacceptable for which he ended up apologizing and going dark for a few weeks and till he got a glowing profile in the New York Times and now he's back at it but uh I think there's a lot of people again it goes back to the money here's a major new money Source in politics here and um there's a long-standing battle between the actual mods in San Francisco and the progressives and if you suddenly have all this help and all of this money flow in it's tempting to throw in with these Tech guys but i' say the moderates are going to have to do some moral Reckoning and figure out whether they can really call themselves Democrats much less moderates if this is the track they're going to be on because it seems to me that they're sort of like selling their souls uh in order to win what not clear but for power for the money that comes with it and so I do I consider it dangerous I don't think that what's happening in Solano is necessarily representative of what will happen everywhere but it gives me hope to see that uh mean the Republicans are even more opposed to it there than the Democrats doesn't help that California forever is suing a group of farmers who won't sell their land for $510 million not way to make friends in a rural County if you wanted to be in a place in California that's more like the Midwest it'd be Solano and so well I do think there's hope I do think people will resist I don't think we want techn feudalism to be our future but I think there's going to have to be a lot more work done by journalists to excavate and tell people what's going on and that was been the purpose of my pieces my audience here is is anyone who wants to read it but it's especially journalists I was in politics for a long time there are very few journalists in California who know as much about politics as I do from the inside this is a scary new development and people need to know about it I couldn't agree more one thing I just want to touch on before we log off is I feel like there's also a lot of sort of racial and gender undertones in this movement can you talk about that because when I look at this movement it's largely driven by white men obviously bologi is Indian but he sort of aligns himself with this extreme group that it does not feel very inclusive I definitely think it's very meloc Centric and always will be I do think that they're willing to overlook racial differences as long as you're completely aligned with their ideology and of course there will be fewer uh of those people making it to the top of the funnel because that's just the way things work and you know it would be considered woke to worry about things like diversity and people having opportunities and being in rooms where it's not all just one person I think there was a CNBC reporter who did a interview with Gary Tann there was a picture on the wall and she was like Hey everybody in this picture is a guy you know and and like that's a big problem they have it's not clear who they're going to uh no what women are even involved in this movement honestly there's a couple but um generally it is that sort of back to like the Lake George lov's conservative hierarchy it's always going to be men over women it's always going to be white over others it's always going to be Western over others it's you know there's a hierarchy to it and on top of that of course is wealthy over everyone else and in this case it'd be the billionaires over the ctim millionaires over the everybody else so what is woke Capital something that you mentioned in your piece can you kind of explain that term yeah well that's what he calls the New York times's Main ideology it's not really clear what he means by that except I think it's this progress agressive idea of freedom and equality that we have considered essential to the American project for the past Century or so really since getting rid of slavery the idea that we move forward through time more people have rights more people have an equal chance at things and that we don't do bad things once we understand them to be bad it's a a win or take all mentality and a might makes right mentality or wealth makes right mentality so I think woke capital is seen as the enemy of really tyranny and despotism right because everyone has right if everyone has rights and we have to worry about things like not oppressing people then uh you can't do anything you want to do right we see the same thing with Elon Musk because who's kind of been the leader of this whole movement and also the movement to be really loud and aggressive and outrageous on Twitter and to make your company brand a political weapon which a few years ago I mean companies have always been involved in politics but the CEO of Exxon isn't on uh Twitter uh tweeting racist memes right that's all changed now that is now the the modus operandi and I think a lot of that flows from musk uh so while they have a lot of power and they making good effort they also make some pretty big mistakes um it'd be much more terrifying to me if they were quietly doing this and I was only assuming this is what they were up to as opposed to them spelling it out in again six hour long podcasts which I would encourage everyone to hear but 6- hour long podc podcast that only their acolytes will probably listen to you know well I think the listenership went up considerably after that new Republic piece but who who even speaks that long besides like Fidel Castro I know um well Gil thank you so much for breaking all of this down I really appreciate your time thanks for having me all right that's the show power user is produced by Travis luk and galani Carter our video producer is Brandon kefir you can watch full episodes of power user on my YouTube channel at Taylor Loren our executive producers are Zach Mack and shot kurwa power user is part of the VOX media podcast network if you like the show give us a rating and review on Apple podcast Spotify or wherever you listen we'll be back next week with a brand new episode of power user see you then

2024-06-01 16:32

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