The Age of Transitions 3-14-2025 Gil Duran

or paperback copies. Also have the affiliate links at the Age of Transitions dot com Libsyn. If you use promo code Fronds, you get two months for free. And if you're ever buying any books online, remember to click through the link to bookshop dot org on my website. Anything you get there, I'll get a small amount back, So thank you for doing that everybody. Typically on Friday nights, I'm live on the Oceleradio network Ocelli dot com and this week was the same, but the beginning of this

particular show got cut off. We just didn't have the recording for it. I have lots of technical difficulties going on across the web, and it's not only the ocell radio network experience experiencing this, but seems to be everywhere.

So the beginning of this interview is cut off, but it's an excellent interview that I had with Gil Duran, who is an independent journalist and he runs the nerd Reich dot com, which is an excellent blog website all about the rise of the network stay the techno fascist billionaires that are going about taking over our government right now, and I was very lucky to get him as a guest at the Age of Transitions. This is an excellent interview.

So right here this interview, I'm just gonna play as much as I have, and most of the interview is still here. This was right as Gil was talking about what he's doing with the nerd Reich and his plans in breaking these stories, and his plans for the future and what he wants to do, So the interview is picking up with that, and then I get into asking him questions about transhumanism and we go from there. So I hope you enjoy this interview. Thank you very much for listening, everybody.

you know, there's some really weird stuff happening. And I went there and there's all these young people that're kind of recruiting into this, who just want to be tech millionaires or billionaires and think, if I hang out with these guys and go along with their stuff, maybe they'll I'll get in the door somehow. So there is this sort of recruitment funnel, and he's taken this thing all over the world, doing this little don't Die conference. Although

the you know, there was definitely some problems. There wasn't enough food, and some of the stuff was off schedule, some of the pre It was basically a conference of people presenting weird health tech things, and some of that was kind of light, so it was a little flimsy.

sort of cult religion based around tech. And like cult religion, which is something I'm very familiar with, there's some when you look closely enough and you're skeptical, you see all the seams and the flaws and the cracks, and they depend on finding worshipful people who just want to believe to go along with their bullshit, basically.

or community or whatever it is. And as this goes on, as these billionaires rise to power and they move forward, it becomes more and more evident to me that they themselves hold a lot of the same ideas that the sort of right wing factions of the alternative conspiracy world hold. I remember reading Andresen's let's it called the Techno Optimist Manifesto. Reading that, I'm like, this is like word for word what all the is independent conspiracy oriented people are saying.

And so there, So at this point it's just like, Okay, these guys are these guys the proprietors of these ideas, and it seems like Musk is now using X to use it as a platform to platform these ideas. What are your thoughts on all of this?

any reason? Can you imagine, you know, if he can develop this capability, what it would be about, what would happen to the world? You know, So they you don't see it as fringe. And I think one advantage they have is that if you try to talk about what they're talking about, you sound crazy. But they're billionaires, right, so they can be crazy. I've actually have known personally a lot of billionaires, or at least a few and

quite a few millionaires. Rich people tend to be pretty crazy and tend to be into stuff that most people wouldn't assume from the outside that they're into, and so they kind of get away with it. And one thing I've noticed that was sort of very frustrating to me as covering this was they're saying this stuff out loud. They're saying it in books, they're saying it in long podcast interviews. They're having entire conferences about this stuff where they talk about it at length and say all kinds

of crazy things. But nobody's listening except the people they're trying to target, Like journalists aren't tuning in. They're just ignoring it. And when you try to explain what's going on, what's being said, people look at you like you're crazy.

when she was the Attorney General of California. So people know who I am and that I have this solid background in real politics. But I felt like my fellow journalists all mostly with a few exceptions, ignored all of my work on this, didn't acknowledged it anyway, not even like a like on a tweet, And nobody texted me to say, hey, what's the stuff you're working on. Everybody just kind of stayed away from it right like it

was crazy stuff. And I think that they're going to regret that when this story comes to the forefront and they realized that probably the biggest story in American political history to take over, the attempted hostel takeover by a handful of tech elites, bubbled up out of the Bay Area in very few people are paying attention to it.

So the point there being that we do need some people focused on the weird stuff coming out of Silicon Valley because we may consider these ideas or these people crazy, but they have enough money to be very dangerous in perpetuity.

And one thing I've been calling for is the creation of some kind of organization specifically to keep a watch on these things and to issue public reports and to create media narratives and other products to shine a bright light on this stuff, because I think that's exposing it is a very important key to defeating it.

And this was a big problem because that would make it the largest city in the county, I believe. And this is a county where they have a slow growth ordinance that strictly forbids exactly the kind of massive expansion that was being called for here. So you're picking this fight with a county where they have rules against this, and you suddenly want to create a new city that would be the biggest city. Not to mention the strain on the environment, there's not enough water or other resources.

And in addition, the traffic is already horrible through this region on the one main interstate, So you're going to add four hundred thousand more people. It's not clear where you're going to build a new freeways in order to make this. So there's a lot of ways in which this project didn't make sense, but the media was largely covering it as debate between the Yimbis who want to build and the Nimbi's who don't want to build. And that's the

frame they got stuck in. That's the frame they're used to. But you know, it didn't make sense that something this dramatic would be proposed by this group of billionaires. And to be honest, I wasn't really closely paying attention to it.

And it was only after I read a review of Quinn Slavonian's Crack Up Capitalism book and got the book and read it that I immediately understood what this was, which was an attempt to create a tech controlled zone where it would be a new city with different rules and you know, kind of a sovereign form of territory, and that basically it was aligned with the network state.

And the deeper I looked, I found that, you know, one of the major investors is Mark Endresen of Nresent Horowitz, a big venture capital firm in California, and the guy who's the main network state evangelist, a guy named Balaji Srinivasan, was a former general partner at Andresent Horowitz. And I started seeing all these connections and realizing that's what it was.

And as I did deeper, it came to my attention that there had been a Network State conference in Amsterdam in twenty twenty three, and at that conference, six hours of people talking about plans to create network states all over the world, their own tech little cities and countries

they're going to control. There was a presentation given by a guy named Spencer MacDonald, who's some kind of security expert, and the presentation was about how to have good security or new network state, you know, basically higher former Special Operations soldiers and have surveillance and drones and all this kind of stuff. So they're already planning for security for

these things, right, They're pretty serious about it. But in his presentation, it was a slide on the screen and it was an artist rendering of California Forever, and I was like, well, that's interesting. They're basically identifying that project at the Network State conference as part of the Network State.

hints at it. But you know, I felt that that was enough of an easter egg or wink and they deny it. They completely deny that there's any connection at all, etc.

weird ass billionaire city project. And it was clear that they tried to put a ballot measure on to get the project approved that it was clear that it was going to go down in massive defeat.

model around the world. And you'll be free from certain kinds of regulations, perhaps run medical testing, which seems to be something. These guys are really interested in escaping the

FDA and not being bound by its rules. Peter Tiil in particular is very interested in taking control of the FDA, and in fact, in twenty seventeen he proposed a candidate to Trump to be the head of the FDA, and that candidate was Boligishrina Vasen, the whole guy who wro the Network State book and is the main evangelist of the Network State idea. So I think that is ultimately the goal, and they were trying to frame it as an innocuous housing project, but anybody familiar with housing knows

that there's nothing about this that makes sense. In fact, there was a quote from a developer of housing in California and the New York Times when the story first came out, who said, no one who knows how to do housing would try to do it in this way. So there's all these things that don't add up. So I think they do plan to have people there, but I think the idea is to have a hierarchical society that is controlled by a corporation, not by a democratic government.

build basically like bunker societies where they can escape. Remember, part of this whole idea is that we're headed towards some kind of major societal collapse and that nation states are not going to survive that, and that they, as the cognitive elite, need to prepare for that change and protect themselves and create these sort of digital surveillance castle societies where they and their crypto and their empires will be safe. And that trace us back to a book called The Sovereign Individual.

we've all read about. Right, So this isn't just something that this goes back to again fringe conspiracy ideas where the prepper sort of concept was seen as whackerdoodle and crazy and this coming collapse was something that everybody would always talk about and definitely in the realm of the fringe conspiratorial like, oh yes, societal collapse, the country's going to fall apart. That was the ramblings of a crazy person once again. But what you're saying is that these

guys believe this, right, they very much believe it. They're not just like pretending for the public. They're serious about it, right, totally.

the way that we should be. There's a lot of things that could go wrong and that are already going wrong. I mean, look at what's become of you know, certain parts of San Francisco and all over California. The homelessness wasn't like this twenty years ago, where you have tin

cities everywhere. We're already seeing some decline. But instead of seeing this as a problem that they might try to solve with their technology and their wealth and their much vaunted intelligence, they seem to want to hasten decline and to somehow benefit and profit from it, which seems deeply immoral to me. And you know, I think it's important to understand that this is the mentality they have, is

this apocalyptic. It's almost like a millenarian movement. We always have these end times movements for the past two thousand years, where people think the end's about to happen and we all have to prepare and we have to, you know, kind of get behind some big idea and you know, the end is nigh and in a way, it's just that, but with billionaires, and it's not the first time we've

seen it. But you know, the aggression with which it's being pursued, especially in the takeover of the US government, is I think unprecedented.

whole thing about Silicon Valley, isn't it. The other part is called voice and voices, where you stay and you use your voice and your power to.

right They've been talking about it for years. And you know, two years ago, this guy named Curtis Jarvin, who's been a very favorite thinker of Peter Thiel's, wrote a whole essay in which he said that if Trump got re elected, what he should do is hire a sort of CEO to be the dictator of the federal government and to operate outside of the authority and the law and the rules, and to purge government of anybody who wouldn't be loyal to the dictator, and that this was the important move

to make. They called it a butterfly revolution, and it sounds a lot like exactly what's going on right now in Washington. So there's two modes. One is to create these new cities. The other is to seize existing governments and turn them into parallel versions of themselves. And they're kind of pursuing both right now, using their control of the government to try to hasten the creation of these

freedom cities and accelerate their birth into the world. And so, you know, when I look at that, people are kind of Trump had these freedom cities in his agenda last year. His campaign plan and it was mentioned in news stories and nobody explained what it meant. Nobody said, what the hell is a freedom city? Yeah, where's the idea come from? Why do we need them? Who's going to live in them? How's it going to work?

Online media, formerly alternative channels for media is very much the platform that this sect owns and operates, right, So what are your thoughts on the propaganda angle of social media, of online media being.

people see and what people hear. You buy up traditional media outlets, and you make the news into something that is the opposite of what it used to be and we see all of that happening right now, and I haven't seen anybody in the mainstream media mention, you know, fifth generation warfare five GW.

York Times and Wired for decades. He's an expert on the future of warfare. And I started reading his newsletter on substack. It's five bucks a month, not the kind of thing I'd usually subscribe to, but it's opposition research. Got to know what they're saying, and he writes very openly about this stuff you know about information war and

how it's being waged. And in fact, a few weeks ago he wrote a whole analysis of what Elon is doing to the govern and he basically said, this is a prototype of the network state, and he explained all the ways in which it's designed to basically replace people with AI and create an entirely new form of government that's more effective for the twenty first century.

piece saying that Trump should have a dictator CEO takeover. Well, after you take over the government, purge it, have your loyalists in control, then you have to start taking over the centers of influence, the media academia, which they're currently attacking right, threatening to defund universities in the United States of America, right to pressure them to bow down to

the right wing religion. They're becoming increasingly religious in their use of language and trying to meld with the Christian evangelical right wing and if you control all of those very influential institutions, then you can start to replace reality itself with a parallel version of reality, basically an unreality. And this is something that fascist and authoritarian regimes always do.

They make it impossible for people to know what's true and what's false and condition them to only accept what the government says as the truth. And that's very much what they're trying to do with this. So it doesn't just stop it taking over the government at purging the bureaucracy and the public institutions. It involves also taking power over all of the influential institutions in society, and they do that through fifth generation warfare. And then they have

an even bigger tool. Right when you can use the media or academia to spread your propaganda and disinformation, it becomes impervious to some degree. And so if any of your listeners haven't heard of fifth generation warfare, I would encourage them to look it up. It may not be the term we all need to use, but it's important to understand that they perceive this to be a propaganda war, a disinformation war, a war in which the most powerful element, the most powerful weapon, is information.

I don't know all the ins and outs of it. I know it's happening. What, in your opinion, might be going on with these guys and using their social media platforms to put out what would be Russian government talking points? What are your thoughts about that? What's the connection between Silicon Valley and Russia?

key to everything. I would say, at the very least Republicans who've always wanted to run government like a business, or so they say, and the Silicon Valley guys see the kleptocracy and oligarchy of Russia as a preferred form

of governance. And there's an important book I read last year by Anne Applebomb called Autocracy, Inc. And it looks at how these autocratic governments all over the world, even those who have nothing in common ideologically, they may be diametrically opposed to each other in terms of ideology, have begun to work together and share technology and information in order to basically improve the efficiency of authoritarianism around the globe.

They've kind of formed a basically a supervillain alliance, and they're not so much concerned with taking over the entire world themselves as they are at making sure that autocracy spreads around the globe, and they keep their power by helping others keep their autocratic power at the very least. I think that Trump and the tech fascists see that

as the preferred form of government. It benefits them the most, and so I think they have a lot in common with Putin and with Russia, because they want our government to work the way that one does, where you have a handful of oligarchs around a dictator, a pretend democracy, where everyone's too afraid to say what they really think, and journalists get shot in the face if they cause trouble, and you don't have to go full on totalitarian to

gain great control over society that's supposed to be democratic, and to scare anybody from resisting that. And so I think that the Russia model where putin wins with what eighty percent of the votes or whatever, is very much seen as as a success in terms of how you pull off an ontocracy in what is supposed to be a democracy. So at the very least that, at the

very worst, there's something much more nefarious going on. There's been you know, you can google Project Russia and see that there's some advance thinking on a more detailed alliance that's more formal. But I'm not the expert on that subject, so I won't go too deep into it. I've gone deep enough into certain subjects and that's my part of the job here.

his captain is coming in making government efficient. This is great, Ronald Reagan, and he'd shed a tear if you were here today. I love it, clearly, And it's hard to tell how much of the population is still on board. It seems like those people are They're losing supporters all the time. It seems like because this is getting more and more obvious as each second goes by, that I guess that would be the question, are people actually do you think that people who were supporters are starting to

turn away? And maybe that's a ray of hope. What do we do about people who are really sucked into this? Do we not do anything? What are your thoughts on that?

I mean, look at these guys are driving the stock market into the gutter, and you know, veterans are being fired. You've got Republicans already showing up the town halls and screaming at their representatives for what's happening. And there was just a pull a focus group of Michigan swing voters who deeply regret voting for Trump and despise what he's doing now. Right, So there's some political fertility there, and too bad we don't have a functioning opposition party that

could take advantage of any of that. The Democratic Party mostly seems to be hiding under a rock these days, and they seemed to be the impression that people will just decide it's bad and come around and be against Trump. But I do think think that they're very rapidly burning through their political capital. But they don't seem to care. And that's what worries me. They don't seem to care. You know, I spent, like I said, seventeen years in politics.

If somebody's driving down the poll numbers, they're gone. Right, It doesn't matter who they are, even if you've been with them a long time a staffer, you get rid of that, you cut off the dead weight, and that's not what's happening. Instead, they're sort of pursuing their project, not with the logic of politicians, but with the logic of suicide bombers. They don't seem to care about the future.

They don't seem to believe there'll be any accountability, and that worries me because I think, you know, if I put myself into their evil minds, one of the things I would do would be to start raising real doubts, sowing real doubts about the electoral system and electoral integrity, and using the power of the government to do that and call into question whether elections are fair and free or whether we need some other process for deciding who's

in charge. At this point, I don't put anything past them. And the reason I say that is because I do not understand, as somebody who had a very successful career in politics, who helped to win a bunch of campaigns people thought were unwinnable, I don't understand why they're don't care about public perception, don't care about popularity, don't care about the stock market, don't care about the economy. This

is suicidal unless they know something that we don't. And so I think that the sooner people get active and start pushing back, you know, pushing pushing our leaders to act to resist, which they're not doing. And I think at some point it's going to take millions of people taking to the streets on a regular basis to show our great rejection of this new form of government they're trying to impose. I think that has to happen very quickly so that they don't think they can get away with it.

imperfect as it may be. Nobody voted to have it destroyed by a handful of foreign born billionaires, And no one voted to have the entire government just completely gutted and destroyed in this fashion and replaced with AI systems that would suck up all of our data and invade everyone's privacy and try to create the Big Brother out of Warwell, you know, in many ways, these guys are

trying to be the villains from science fiction. They're trying to you know, they seem to sympathize with the villains and all the science fiction narratives, and they're trying to reverse engineer their way to that dystopia. And so I think that, you know, it's a very old narrative. Most of human history is a small group of elites trying to tyrannize the majority of the people, and it usually

doesn't end well for the tyrants. There are a lot more of us than there are of them, and so I think people are probably feeling afraid right now.

no authoritarian regime generally can withstand it. And when I I've been doing a lot of traveling recently, when I look out the window or I go through a town like Portland or San Francisco or New York, there's a tremendous amount of wealth and power that has been accrued and amassed here by millions of Americans for generations.

barely one by one percent. Right, it was a close race. It wasn't like, oh wow, American landslide for a fascist takeover. This is a very slim race. Remember, we don't need everybody. We don't need the MAGA base. We just need those people who kind of vote either way and the people

who mostly we need the people who stayed home. And when you can't buy eggs and when every the prices everything's going up and you're worried that we're going to head into a depression or at least a deeper session, that's the kind of thing that gets people motivated, and that's what they're doing right now. You know, I went to Trader Joe's yesterday and I was in there trying to buy eggs, and the clerk told me I had two dozen, you can only buy one dozen by two,

Like we're already at rationing eggs. This is insane, But you know, I felt lucky because for the past month or two, Trader Joe's hasn't had any eggs, so people are feeling it. Remember this election was supposedly one because of eggs, right, This is one of the superficial narratives. The media likes to tell itself that, oh, the price of eggs was too high, that's why. Well look at now, why isn't anybody talking about the fact that, like, you

can't buy eggs or they're being rationed again. The media tends to play tends to give the Trump types of pass and hold the Democrats highly accountable, mostly because the Republicans have normalized complete insanity and corruption, and so it's not considered news that they lie and they steal, only cheat. It's only news if the Democrats do it. Not the Democrats are perfect. But you know, we haven't seen the Democrats try to overthrow the country yet.