The Nerd Reich podcast, episode 1: The Network State

Just what the world needs: another podcast.

However, since this newsletter is growing, I wanted to bring in some other voices and build the conversation in different formats. I'm far from the only person talking about this alarming stuff. Some very smart people have been studying these issues for a very long time. We need to hear from them.

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In the explosive first episode, I teamed up with economic sociologist Brooke Harrington (a professor at Dartmouth) and internet politics expert Dave Karpf (a professor at the George Washington University) to decode the alarming rise of the Network State ideology.

We take a deep dive into how tech billionaires like Elon Musk are trying to dismantle traditional governance to create their own power structures through crypto and artificial intelligence. We discuss the hidden dangers behind AI-driven government, the disturbing intersection of wealth and political influence, and why understanding human behavior through humanities matters now more than ever.

Plus, we share bold predictions about where tech authoritarianism is heading and reveal strategies for resisting the growing control of billionaire tech elites. Don't miss this essential conversation about the fight for democracy's future!

Cameos by Tom of Finland and Zombie John Maynard Keynes!

Brooke Harrington is the author of Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism.

Dave Karpf recently wrote a scathing review of Balaji Srinivasan's book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country. Read it: The Tech Barons have a blueprint drawn in crayon. They have not thought any of this through.

Major thanks to our excellent producer, R.R. Robbins – and to our paid subscribers, who make this work possible. If you aren't yet a paid subscriber, please join hundreds of fellow readers in supporting this work. Your support matters! Click here to join.

Below is a full transcript of our conversation.

Transcript: Episode 1: The Network State, with Brooke Harrington and Dave Karpf.

Transcripts are edited for brevity and clarity and may contain errors.

Gil Duran: Welcome to the Nerd Reich podcast, where we decode the secret playbooks that extremist tech billionaires are now using to disrupt democracy and seize power, all under the banner of innovation. This week's episode focuses on the Network State, this idea to replace our democratic institutions with tech-driven visions of governance. It claims to offer an alternative traditional countries and nations, but it's really trying to concentrate power in the hands of tech billionaires.

Our guests today are Brooke Harrington and Dave Karpf. Professor Harrington is an economic sociologist who studies the habits of the super wealthy, the offshore financial system, and the professionals who run it. She's the author of Offshore, Stealth, Wealth, and the New Colonialism. And given how much of the Network State ideology is based around alternative economic models, she's the right person to talk to right now.

Also joining us is Dave Karpf, Associate Professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at the George Washington University. He's written extensively on tech issues, including a recent in-depth article in the Atlantic about one of the lesser talked about tech oligarchs when it comes to the network state, OpenAI's Sam Altman. And he's written a bit about one of the network state's chief gurus, Balaji Srinivasan, including a painstaking review of the Network State book that Balaji wrote and published for free, self-published for free, online.

So, welcome to you both. Thanks for being here.

Dave Karpf: Thanks for having us.

Brooke Harrington: Thank you.

Gil Duran: Let's start with the basic premise for people who don't know what the supposed network state is or why some tech billionaires have this idea that's gaining traction among them. So just we're all on the same page. I thought we'd start generously by giving Balaji Srinivasan's definition. He's someone we'll be talking about today. He's a tech bro, a crypto guy, formerly worked for Andreessen, formerly worked for Coinbase. And he's been talking for years about building something called the network state, which is basically where tech bros build their own countries or take over existing countries, which may sound familiar to some people. And here's Balaji's definition of the network state:

“A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowd funds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.”

Brooke, let's start with you. How would you explain what this concept is and what's the real underlying idea here?

Brooke Harrington: I think a lot of the idea here is to reconfigure power and wealth in such a way that it ends up in the pockets of a small group of broligarchs, including Balaji if he has his way. The plans for this have been attempted in the offshore financial world for the past 50 years.

There's an historian at Cornell named Ray Kraib who published a book, I think two years ago called Adventure Capitalism, which goes into gruesome detail on the 50 years of shocking experimentation, political economic experimentation on vulnerable post-colonial countries with fragile new democracies and fragile economies and limited capacity to fight back where the literal ancestors of people involved in today's network state movement like Milton Friedman, grandfather of Patri [Friedman], were instrumental in say, approaching an island nation in the South Pacific and saying, “Well, we know you're having kind of a hard time economically. How about we come in and give you a bunch of money and you use your sovereign power to make laws in such a way that we can do financial things that would not be legal in our home countries.”

And many of those countries, not knowing any better, took the offer, turned out to be kind of a Faustian bargain because they were letting in people who didn't want those countries to be independent democracies. They wanted them to use their country's sovereign power to make laws as a rubber stamp to help this soi-disant oligarchy assemble power.

They're sort of like the laboratories of Dr. Frankenstein, where they put together all manner of monstrosities. I'm thinking of Peter Thiel's attempt to do unregulated human subjects research on, was it herpes or syphilis? Where he got a bunch of people offshore to subject themselves to trials that he wants to initiate that are unencumbered, shall we say, by the...pesky rules of the Food and Drug Administration.

So they're not just doing things that make them richer, they're doing things that experiment with the boundaries of power and human rights, because they want all that for themselves. And now they're bringing it home with this network state thing. It's been a long, slow process of generations, but it's here now.

Gil Duran: And now seems to be accelerating. Dave, how would you define to someone who's never heard of it what this network state idea is about, what's underlying it?

Dave Karpf: So I feel like the short version is this is Galt's Gulch plus blockchain. And yeah, so if you don't know what Galt's Gulch is, first of all, congratulations I hate to hate to put that in your worldview. Galt's Gulch comes from an Ayn Rand book. It is not a good book. But the imagery comes out of Atlas Shrugged and the idea is that all of the makers of society, the rich innovators who hold up society, will move away to their own place and the rest of society will just wither away because they lack the wonderful makers who control it, who like create all the value. And then they'll have their own little paradise. Ayn Rand is the writer of childish fantasies that rich people for generations now have read and said, yeah, I'm a maker, that's about me.

This is underlying not just the Network State now but, if we go back a couple of decades, Brooke mentioned Patri Friedman. He's one of the people who for years and years tried to prop up this idea of Seasteading, which was “we will build our own island nations out in the middle of the ocean…you know, we'll just sort of like put together a bunch of basically boats and then we'll have our own island nation. And there we can have whatever rules we want because other countries can't control us.”

And to me, the question that you always want to ask these people is like, hey, who picks up the trash in your island nation? like, who cleans the dishes? Because this idea that we'll just have an island paradise of makers, or in Balaji's version, it's like they started on the blockchain. So literally, you can just have your apartment entered into a Network State, and then it's not part of a normal nation. It's part of a Network State, diplomatically, all the states, all the countries will be fine with that because, I don't know, you're rich or something.

But like the idea that people would go along with that and it would go just fine….In the review that I wrote of this, what I wanted to sort of make clear was like, this is a plan for how they want to disrupt and replace government. But it's also it's a plan that is written in crayon. They have not thought any of this through. It's just that they're so wealthy, and they don't like being taxed or being told no.

And so in the same way that Ayn Rand, generations ago, was saying, you know, magically, we'll just have Galt’s Gulch and the rest of the world will fall apart because they won't have the benefits of your innovator brilliance. Now they're saying “we can really do that because we have the blockchain” –  as though the blockchain has really disrupted anything.

 Gil Duran: Galt's Gulch is this secret territory for super wealthy and talented people to go and hide out in while the rest of the world falls apart. And that seems to be kind of a basic idea here of the Network State. It's an offshoot of “doomerism” and “prepperism” where these rich people think that the future is going to be very dark and they have to prepare their own systems of government and their own sovereign territories to be protected and to be empowered during some kind of societal collapse.

And when I started writing about this, it was because I saw these tech bros trying to take over the government of San Francisco and trying to build this weird new tech city in Solano County, about 60 miles north of San Francisco. And so I kind of reverse engineered my way into the network state discussion. And I was very hesitant when people kept trying to tell me about because it sounded a little too complicated, sounded a little bit conspiratorial. But the more I did research, and actually I read Quinn Slobodian's Crack Up Capitalism, and that was really when like the it started to gel was that they are very serious about this and they do have this idea that this is what the future is going to be like. But I find myself, in writing about this, getting some pushback – as I initially pushed back – on the idea that is this really a serious political project or is this just a bunch of tech billionaires being weird on podcasts.

And I'd say that now in 2025, we see that it's actually pretty serious with the tech. Elon Musk is running the government from the inside. They're carrying out these ideas they've been talking about for a while. But I think more than just the offshoot countries they want to form, we now see this sort of seizure of the United States federal government itself. So I do think it's kind of serious and people need to understand it more.

And recently I wrote something about a guy named John Robb, who's a former United States Air Force officer and a guy who's kind of a respected military analyst in some circles. And he wrote an article about, you know, that this is a “prototype of the Network State,” this takeover, tech takeover of the United States government. And he's very pro-Elon, and by the way, he's pro-network state, so I disagree with him. But it was interesting to see somebody with a military background and these sort of credentials talking openly about a post-government America, which would have been kind of a source of trouble for you in some past decade.

We've seen them continue to be very open about these ideas and plans. What does this say about where their movement is now, Brooke, with kind of Elon Musk's takeover of government? Because there are two modes of the network state.

 One is go start your own island, go start your own country or territory. The other one, Voice they call it. So Exit is when you go and start your own country. Voice is when you stay and you take over an existing government and you transform it into something else. Do you think this is something that that you think that's what's happening or do think it's something else going on right now? Is this the Network State?

Brooke Harrington: Okay, I gotta stand up for Albert Hirschman for a minute. That Exit, Voice, Loyalty thing, that comes from Albert Hirschman's work. And Voice doesn't necessarily mean that you execute a hostile takeover of democracy. That is one possible instantiation of Voice. Voting is Voice, too. You can participate in the system in a constructive way.

Dave Karpf: Yes.

Brooke Harrington: I would just like to note that like how ironic it is that someone like Robb is talking about how great it would be if the US government fell apart. I mean he reminds me a lot of Ayn Rand, actually, because like Ayn Rand was all like “yap yap yap” about how terrible the government was but she cashed her Social Security check when the time came and Robb, as an Air Force officer, would have a pension and lifetime health insurance for himself and his family, thanks to TRICARE, all paid for by us, the taxpayers.

They're like – somebody very aptly described these libertarians as like indoor cats who don't understand what outdoors is. They think they're like these fiercely independent kings of the jungle…my God, I made Dave Karpf laugh. Apex life experience. My god. Okay. Thank you. I wish you could all see this moment. It's even better than making Jon Stewart laugh.

So, they're like indoor cats and they're like “I am the king of the jungle…change my litter and feed me Fancy Feast. That's what they're like. They're absurd people. If they weren't rich we would be giggling at them because they're absurd. And that's the thing about reading the history of these movements, whether it's offshore or here onshore. Not too far from where I live, a 20 minute drive from my house, is Grafton, New Hampshire, which is the site of yet another failed libertarian experiment that famously got run out of town on a rail by bears because these losers didn't bank on the fact that they were living in the middle of a forest with animals. Like that's what indoor cats they are. They're like, “Look at us. We're fierce, independent people. my God, what's that?”

So I would describe the current state of Network State theory as being highly resilient to the intrusions of empirical reality, much like Stalinism and Maoism in that their ideas cannot fail, they can only be failed. And that's a religion. That's not even politics, that's just a religion.

 And that's why it's so hard to point out to these people, your ideas don't work. Because they don't have a rational orientation to them, they have a religious ideological orientation to them. And so what we see in someone like Musk is the ideological fervor of a Savonarola, piling up books to burn. He doesn't care that it's going to hurt him long term. He doesn't care that he's destroying the country that made him personally prosperous. He has this belief, and it cannot be swayed. And that's what makes these people so dangerous.

 Dave Karpf:  So if I can pick up on that: We need to both take them seriously and also laugh at them. And the seriousness doesn't come from this being a coherent set of ideas or a plan that would go well. It comes solely from the amount of wealth and power that they have, right? If Elon Musk had $400 million instead of $400 billion – though actually, if I checked Tesla stock right now, he might be in the 300 today, it's been a bad week for him personally – but if he had $300 million or $400 million, you and I would not have to care about his silly ideas. And this also goes into those network states that they've tried to prop up in other countries, in Solano County. I remember reading a New York Times piece.

Probably a year and a half ago about it was Prospera or one of the other, you know, they got all these names for the ones they want to set up, but the guy behind it was like some random guy with no, neither governing experience nor real estate experience who pitched the idea in like an actual pitch deck to Peter Thiel and Peter Thiel's like, yeah, here's like $50 million. And on the one hand, $50 million is a lot of money to get things done. So we should take it seriously.

And in another sense, it's a rounding error to Peter Thiel. It's just a fun thing for him to donate to. Like the people who have backed Seasteading don't go and actually try to live on the Seasteads. That would be ludicrous. But it's a fun idea and they like to imagine it could work out and they're VCs. used to putting money into random ideas that could work out. So they put the money in and then we have to pay attention because like, wow, that's $50 million. That's a lot of dollars. But that is solely because we didn't tax VC wealth over the past few decades, and now they have such absurd wealth that their bad ideas have gravitational force that can bend society. That's what we're stuck with…Balaji's book is, I think, the worst book I have ever read. It did psychic damage to me reading just how ridiculous this self-published garbage was. And also he is so well connected and so wealthy. We haven't mentioned it yet, but like this is the guy who bet a million dollars that the US dollar would collapse and Bitcoin would go to like a million. And somebody actually took the bet on Twitter and like he immediately lost. This was a couple of years ago. Like he was bound to lose. Not that people make fun of Balaji for this stuff. And he has so much money that he can lose a million dollars and then just do a podcast where he's like, yeah, but you know, I illustrated a good point there. It's like, no, man, you just…Like, if I lost $10 as a rounding error, I would put it off as a joke and it'll be like, yeah, it's 10 bucks, it's fine. These guys are so rich that they can lose a million dollars that way. And that can warp society. It can take over a government. They control the US government, so we should care what they think. But that doesn't mean any of this is thought through.

Gil Duran: It's the money that has enabled them to get the power, right? And I think to your point earlier, Brooke, the idea of this is a very religious culty idea. I've considered it a cult for the past year, a small group of people with an irrational belief, but who have enough power to cause some damage. And increasingly they are using some very religious language and pushing this sort of religious movement to meld Christianity with this tech ideology we're starting to see that more and more the New York Times did a story about it this thing called Act 17 Garry Tan and Trae Stephens of Anduril are about to have a talk about how the scripture justifies the pursuit of their tech quests. Peter Thiel referred to Trump's second election as an “apocalypse” – an unveiling, a revelation – and spoke about it in very religious terms. So they are trying to sort of meld this beyond just some kind of scientific or logical argument towards something that's also imbued in religion.

But let's talk about money for a second, because you were on that point, Dave. There's a long history of the rich avoiding governance and taxes or trying to do so, whether it's long-term tax avoidance or gold in a Swiss bank. And Brooke, you've done extensive reporting on the finances that color outside the lines when it comes to other countries, especially in your book, Offshore.

Massive wealth and crypto are playing a big role in this effort by tech people to take over government. Can you talk about the way that crypto and this massive tech wealth has kind of shifted the traditional games that rich people play in terms of trying to evade laws, taxes, rules and reality? How does it work historically and then is there a difference in how it works now?

Brooke Harrington: The thing you have to understand is that one of things that makes the modern nation-state system work are two monopolies. One is on the use of legitimate force, that's the military and the police, legitimacy being the key thing there. And the second is the ability to create and maintain fiat money, which is money issued by a government that has value because it says so.

 So, you know, when you pull out U.S. currency and you see printed on the back, in God we trust and all the funny little symbols, that's a way of saying, well, this piece of green and white paper only really has value because the U.S. government says it has value. And that's actually the product of decades of infighting in the United States between people who are called gold bugs, people who said, you know, we should only ever have like gold and silver currency, and people who are like, no, if we're going to be a modern country, we have to have paper currency. The paper currency people won. There have always been people who stayed gold bugs the whole time and were never convinced, the paper money people won. And that's one of the bases of the nation state. It's such a hot button issue that when the EU was formed, if you've ever been to the European Union or held euros, you'll notice the notes don't represent any real place that exists in the world.

 They're just like clip art that you could get from Microsoft Word showing bridges and doors, because that's the only thing that the member states could agree on. It could have had the leaning tower of Pisa or the Coliseum or the Eiffel Tower, but none of the member states wanted anyone to achieve primacy. So what they did was they created a fiat currency for the European Union that just had this idea like there is a state, there is a monetary union here, and it backs this.

 What crypto is trying to do is steal that monopoly from the nation state system as a way to undermine the nation state system and reconfigure global power, kind of in the same way that after the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles carved up the Middle East, except now in the 21st century, they want to do it on a global scale, and they're not going to do it in the name of any one empire or nation state. They want to do it in the name of individuals and their multinational firms, and those individuals are the broligarchs.

 Gil Duran: Just in the past week, we've had this official pitch for the Strategic Crypto Reserve, which is probably the first White House pitch as a pump and dump scheme, right? There was this big up and down in the crypto world. And, you know, we're also seeing that Justin Sun, who was charged with selling unregistered securities and fraudulently manipulating the price of a digital token, Tronix pumped $75 million into the Trump family-backed crypto token and now his case is on hold, right? So we're seeing the money being used in these different ways, crypto becoming this power. We saw during the election, crypto became a massive player, suddenly escalated and taking out Democrats and pushing other pro-crypto Democrats and showing that they're gonna use that wealth to get power. This all seems to be very much in the open.

 I mean, money has always tried to play a role in our political system, but this seems to be getting pretty extreme in terms of both the power and the corruption that we're seeing openly demonstrated here. Is this worse than it's ever been, or this just a new flavor of how it's always worked?

 Dave Karpf: So it is worse than it's ever been, empirically. The thing to flag here is crypto is the best example of it, but it's not the cause. The cause of it is the Supreme Court. In a world where the Supreme Court hadn't made the Citizens United case and said, you know what, money is speech and people can spend basically whatever they want. This level of spending would have been so flatly illegal that we wouldn't have seen it. So, I mean, 15, 20 years ago, it's not that the very rich didn't want to influence politics. It's that there were limits. And then the Supreme Court decided, well, how about if there just aren't limits anymore? And what got added into the mix here in particular is when, during the Biden administration, the great sin of Biden.

 This is – I'm not going to directly quote Mark Andreessen here, but I'm paraphrasing him pretty well. Like the thing that's so pissed off Mark Andreessen and the rest of the tech barons, which we can also call broligarchs, because I'm just changing it up. I like both lines. But what really pissed them off is Biden and his team, Lina Khan in particular, had the temerity to say, actually, “maybe government should be in charge of governing.” Like maybe we will actually apply antitrust law to the largest companies that don't have any competition because while we are under capitalism, capitalism thinks that monopolies are bad. So we haven't done that basically since the Microsoft case was dismissed in 2001. And we had just what, three and a half years or so of the government actually applying antitrust again.

 The FTC said to AI companies and just a wonderful memo, said, Hey, AI companies, we just want to be clear. If you say you are using AI for a product, you are not allowed to be, you are not allowed to lie. That would be fraud. Don't do fraud. And the entire AI sector was like, “how are we going to innovate if we can't do fraud?” At the same time, the SEC under Gary Gensler said to all the crypto, like everybody in crypto, Hey, if it's an unregistered security. That's illegal and we’ll bring lawsuits.”

And Andreessen Horowitz, or A16Z as they like to call themselves, like A16Z, the crypto industry, all of big tech basically looked at that and said, “Hold on, if you're going to judge us based on our results and not our ambitions, that's a violation of how you used to treat us back in like the nineties and the aughts. We need to kick you all out of office. How dare you try to regulate us like the largest companies in the world.”

So it’s a combination of the Supreme Court saying, hey, spend whatever you want. Spending decades and decades not regulating the tech industry until it just got way too much wealth and power. And then Biden having the temerity to say, yeah, actually we should do something about that obvious problem. And again, like in a world where Kamala Harris wins, all those investigations would still be going on. Elon Musk was saying before the election, “If Kamala Harris wins, I'm going to go to jail.” I don't know what he meant specifically, but there are a lot of investigations that just got canceled. the everything was in fact on the line just a few months ago because the project of putting the U.S. government back in the role of government was one that tech was rebelling against was deeply angry about. But then they won. And now Trump has basically said, “Hey, Musk, hey, Andreessen, hey, David Sacks – you guys can just run the government, do whatever you want.”

This is a huge problem which connects to the Network State. But it's all downstream of, if the Supreme Court had just decided to treat laws like they're real laws, we wouldn't be in this mess either.

 Brooke Harrington: As Dave was speaking, I was thinking this is a project to discipline government. That's the sort of polite term that social scientists use for more powerful entities crushing less powerful entities. So it's usually used in the context of the phrase “disciplining labor.” And what that means is like preventing people from forming labor unions, artificially suppressing wages, minimizing labor protections. And so one of the things that's very characteristic of the 21st century, I think, that's often not well understood is that we have AI and crypto, which are written about in the popular press as primarily technology projects, but I think they're best understood as political projects that are delivered in a Trojan horse of technology to sort put them above political analysis. But that's what they are. Like crypto is a project to discipline government by taking away one of its two monopolies, which means kicking legs out from under its power, just as AI is a project to discipline labor. You know, Andreessen was just out saying, it's going to be wonderful when AI causes so many people to be either unemployed or working for pennies on the dollar. Everyone will be able to afford everything.

And it's like the ghost of John Maynard Keynes is going to rise from the grave and like bash this man about the head and shoulders for saying things like that, because it's so freaking absurd. Like, where does he think the money comes from?

Santa Claus? The Tooth Fairy? Like, I don't know what to do with people like this and I don't understand why they get multi-million-dollar salaries for thinking thoughts like that.

 Dave Karpf: I do want to point out this is one of my hopes for how we get out of this mess. Zombie Keynes just rises.

 Like Elon just this past weekend was saying a bunch of nonsense about how, yeah, like when the government pays people to dig holes and fill them back in, that shouldn't be part of GDP. And I was like, you have not read Keynes. And then he followed up by being like, Keynes is an idiot. And it's like, my man, you don't understand macroeconomics better than John Maynard Keynes. And if we can get Zombie Keynes to handle this, that will even the score. I don't have a lot of ideas for how to fix things, but Zombie Keynes, that would do it real quick.

 Brooke Harrington: HAHAHAHA

 Gil Duran: They often seem to think that they're smarter than people they've actually never heard of or read before. They often think they're inventing some new thing and don't realize there's a whole conversation that's been going on, sometimes for thousands of years, often for hundreds of years, maybe for dozens of years, but that a lot of thinking and troubleshooting and stress testing has already been done on a lot of the ideas that they're trying to destroy.

 For instance, our system of government has a long lineage going all the way back to the Greeks and the Romans and all of history to try to avoid disruptive revolutionary cycles where everything falls apart and where we kind of all turn on each other and have a big war of some kind. And they seem to just want to do away with that and impose sort of a tyranny of the wealthy, which is actually a big pattern in history, the wealthy becoming tyrannical, forcing the majority of people to rise up in some kind of violent revolution. And so they seem to have very little awareness of this, or else they're getting chat GPT to do their Cliffs notes and then they think they understand something that they actually don't understand. Of course, anybody who's a critical thinker or scholar knows that you also have to take into account the things that counter your theory the things that might undermine it, and they don't do any of that. So what we see really is the rich still trying to do what the rich have always done, and this idea that the Republicans have long espoused that government should be run like a business. And it turns out that the business in question now is going to be Elon Musk's Twitter.

 But, and you kind of hit on this a bit, both of you in your comments, what does this mean for normal everyday people? What's the outcome for them when you use a Silicon Valley model for a country in where you're not a citizen, you're a subscriber or a customer?

 What's that going to mean for people, when there's no jobs and when you have to basically buy into a corporate version of governance or else have what? Have nothing in its place? That seems to be one of things these guys don't factor in is what does this mean for most people?

 Brooke Harrington: If I could just add, this is where it becomes very obvious that the broligarchs who are leading this charge have never had to clean up anyone's messes. They've never done care work in their lives. Elon Musk goes around impregnating women, like, you know, the way he'd like throw some wildflower seeds in a random yard and just goes on his merry way. There's a very gendered aspect to this. There's a reason that there aren't many women libertarians, you know. Ayn Rand is very much an exception here.

 The only people who would think this was a good idea are literally people who have never had to clean up any messes for anybody, including themselves. And it shows. I wouldn't imagine Elon Musk knows how to do laundry or wash a dish, much less, well, what happens when you move fast and break things? There's an army of people behind all those tech bros sweeping up the broken glass, cleaning the shit off the walls that they leave. Remember the scenes in the Capitol after January 6th? There was this poignant moment where now Representative Kim was on his hands and knees with a dustpan and a broom cleaning up the mess. These broligarchs wouldn't get within a country mile of any of that kind of work. So of course it's easy to fantasize about how fun and cool it is to break things because they don't understand the value of the things that they're breaking and they don't understand what it costs to put things back together because they're never the people who have to put them back together. So what it means for everyday Americans, is living in a house full of broken stuff that doesn't work. Your oven doesn't work. The lights don't turn on. And you're going to have to wait for someone like, you know, the mommy Democratic Party to come on and fix everything.

I'm thinking about the work of George Lakoff, whom you know so well, who wrote about how in American politics, the big psychodrama is between the feminized Democratic Party, who stands for all the things moms stand for, and the masculinized that it's not really fair to men. It's the strict father model of the Republican party, which is, know, the strict father model. We see this now in this bizarre sort of homoerotic projection onto Donald Trump is daddy's home and he's taking off his belt as Mel Gibson said, like – paging Tom of Finland.

 Like, that's so wild. Right? It's like, how much more homoerotic can you get? But all these fantasy projections onto male power, and that's what Doge and Musk are trying to project, too. And nobody wants to live in a house full of broken windows and appliances that don't work. But a few people enjoy watching Daddy break a bunch of stuff.

 Dave Karpf: Yeah, so there's two bits that I want to add. One is: I think we should take seriously that being a billionaire is bad for your mental health. Right? I would suggest…I sometimes try to play out the thought experiment of how weird I would get if I had billions of dollars and thus was surrounded by people who were always telling me how brilliant I am and cleaning up any messes that arose as a result.

 That warps your brain, like that warps your psyche. I would get weird eventually probably in the way that some of these guys are weird. Like, God bless, I don't have billions of dollars, so I think I can remain stable. But some of what's going on here is like not only have they never done care work, never cleaned up their own messes, but they've been so ensconced and privileged for so long that they've come to believe the hype that they are geniuses who, whose every instinct must be correct.

 And one of the ways that this shows up is Musk over the years has several times made reference to the thought experiment that we might be living in a simulation. He believes in simulation theory, which states, assuming Moore's law goes on for forever, which by the way, it doesn't, but assuming it does, we would eventually have computers so powerful that they could simulate all of known history.

 And since there'll be billions of them, then whatever reality you're in, there's like a one and up in billions chance that you're in base reality. And the thing that sticks out is like, if I was living Elon Musk's charmed life, I could see why looking around and be like, the only way this charmed life could be happening is if I was the main character of a video game and everybody else was not real. Like I can see how, you know, like this guy tried to be in charge of get out the vote for Trump's campaign, did an awful job of it. Trump got elected anyway.

That was one moment where I looked at and said, yeah, maybe we are in a video game and that dude's the main character. Cause how else can you explain that colossal fuck-up going fine? But also if you believe that, then you're also going to believe that you and a 19-yea- old named Big Balls can just overturn the whole US government and it'll go great because it's a video game and this is just the next level. And, or as much people die, they're not real people anyway.

 Now, the second point that goes along with that is, you know, where this leads is things like Social Security checks not getting mailed out and millions of people being impoverished of things that they have a right to and expected. That leads to social people, right? Like a reminder that I want to give to people is on the one hand, we now have very clear evidence that democracy is very fragile and it is now in trouble.

 We should also keep in mind, that autocracy is also very fragile. So we have people who are now breaking government because they think they can do no wrong and it'll go great. That's going to be a period of serious pain that we did not need. I'm an old climate activist. I got to tell you, we really didn't need this in terms of climate response. This is genuinely terrible. And also, it's not going to last for forever because people will not stand for this either electorally or if there's no elections, then through other means.

 Because when you break down all of government, then you have a mass society that reminds you why you wanted to have a government to begin with. Social stability is just gonna go out the window.

 Gil Duran: Well, on that point, so we got this Network State idea. The heart of it is rich people having more power than everyone else and being able to be the authoritarian government and have everything work as they wish to be the government. We're seeing Elon do a very literal version of that, at least –  today Trump did say, “okay, Elon can't fire everybody in every department.” You know, Musk's poll numbers are diving precipitously. Even Republicans are showing up angry at town halls. So they are coming up against the reality that in the simulation, there are other people, they have opinions, and they do have some fair degree of power. And I worked in politics for a lot of my career.

 It's shocking to me that you're out there already pissing off all these Republicans and that in February of 2025, there were Republicans yelling at their congressmen in town halls. That, for me, if I were a Republican, I'd be like, “This is a warning sign. We gotta recalibrate this a bit.”

 It would be much more scary to me if they were going a little more slowly and making it seem a little more sane and sort of boiling the frog. But they seem to be in quite a hurry. I still think it's scary because they may know something we don't about what's right around the corner or what the future is. But one of the things they seem to be doing in their great ignorance of humans and humankind, and how humans work and feel, and think is trying to pitch governance by artificial intelligence. And this idea is emerging through Musk's work at Dodge – I call it Dodge because no one really says “Doge” and he's trying to dodge democracy. That's not my idea. Someone else came up with that. I thought that's good. That's some sound symbolism we shouldn't go along with. But what he's doing through Dodge is trying to get rid of human beings and put his AI systems in charge to allegedly make better decisions. Although we're also seeing that it's making a lot of major mistakes, which anybody who's used the LLM knows that hallucinations and mistakes are a big part of it. You need human oversight to get the most out of this sort of word game system. So the idea though is that instead of human governance, we will have AI systems making faster decisions without human interaction or human problem. I don't believe that for one minute. I think AI is going to serve its masters. It's going to serve whoever sets it up to achieve a certain goal. I don't think there's some false neutrality, but what would it mean to have these AI systems in place? What's point of that and what do you think they're trying to achieve with this sort of new AI government? Keeping in mind too that I think a part of this is to have a tool that Elon Musk will keep the keys to even if Trump somehow is no longer in office, to have leverage over the United States for in perpetuity. Brooke, it looked like you wanted to say something.

 Brooke Harrington: Your first question was what will it be like if they get their way and AIs becomes our dominant mode of interacting with our government? And I think it's going to be like being trapped in voicemail hell forever. Because think of all the interactions we already have with AI systems. Like I can't call my freaking doctor's office without dealing with a menu of options, none of which matches what I need to do.

So AI systems like our existing voicemail systems are based on assumptions that maybe are OK for 75 % of cases. But if you're in that other 25%, you're screwed. If a computer says no and what you really need is a human to intervene, which is frankly all of us have experienced that, right? It's already incredibly frustrating even when you can get to a person.

But imagine if you can never get to a person. Maybe that will be the thing that gets people out on the streets. And the other part of your question is, why is he doing this long term? I think as with crypto, with AI, basically the free market has rejected it.

Dave probably knows this the best of the three of us, but as far as I know, generative AI has spectacularly failed to meet expectations for popular adoption.

 If business were operating normally along Schumpeterian lines like creative destruction, what's supposed to happen is you're a businessman, you try some things. Some of them won't work. The ones that won't work, you go back to the drawing board and you either tinker with them till they do work or you abandon them and move on. What you don't do is force them down the throats of the public and force them to pay for them anyways, which is what we're getting more and more from business. Like when you buy a car now, you don't really buy a car. You buy a car with some subscription features that if you happen to forget to pay for them, oops, your car doesn't work anymore. Like, that's outrageous!

And yet it's being forced down our throats. So Elon Musk has developed this idea to its platonic ideal and burrowed himself like an engorged tick into the skin of Uncle Sam saying, okay, I know you don't want my AI, but you're going to get it anyways because I'm going to weld it into the federal government systems. So even if Donald Trump leaves office, guess what? All of federal air traffic control, it relies on systems that I own and control. And he's already done it.

 The guy owns what, 60 % of all the satellites circling the earth? I wish I could go back in time and like have a word with whoever signed off on that. I think it was the Obama administration and say like, what the hell were you thinking?

 Dave Karpf: So there's a couple of bits that I would add in. One is, I think we should take seriously that they believe this is how science and technology works, and they happen to be catastrophically wrong. This is what I did an essay about this, which is gonna get wrapped into the book that I'm writing, the essay is called The Myth of Technological Inevitability. There's a sense amongst the tech bros, and this goes back 20, 30 years. The example that I gave in the essay was the way people in Silicon Valley in the mid 1990s were actually talking about human cloning. And they were saying, look, we've done the human genome project. This stuff, you can't put the toothpaste back in the bottle. This is going to happen. And so we just need to not regulate it and let it happen. About human cloning.

 The model that they often have in mind for how science works is that there's this one hard problem left. And once we solve it, everything will be simple. Right. So in the moment when Human Genome Project is getting is getting figured out, is being finished, they have this notion of like, okay, that was a big heavy undertaking. But once it's done, we're living in Gattaca, baby, like we're there. And the reality if you've ever actually like met a work-bench scientist is that it's hard problems all the way down.

 As soon as you solve this thorny problem, there's another thorny problem, right? Like this is also the story of why Elon Musk always thinks that self-driving cars and mass are like six months to a year away. It's because he thinks once we solve this next problem, then my scientists will have it all worked out. It's also the problem, the like explanation of why he's so excited to go to Mars so soon. If you talk to anyone serious, what they'll tell you is sure, even if you can solve the problem of getting a rocket to Mars and back from Mars.

 There's also the problem of Mars itself, like all the dirt in Mars is poison. So like, how are people going to live there? So many more problems you need to work out. When Musk has asked about this, he always says, those are actually all trivial problems. Like he thinks if we can solve the one problem, everything works fine. The way this relates to AI is like we can, I can certainly imagine a science fiction universe where AI is good enough that you no longer need human air traffic controllers because the AI could do it.

 I can imagine 50 years from now that neural networks could solve that problem. They can't solve it now. But if you believe that the way you solve those problems is just by solving this next one and then everything will be simple. And all you need to do is disrupt government and then like your guys will work it out by like polling late night, like, like pulling all-nighters until they get it done. Like just be hardcore engineers and it all gets solved in six months.

 If you believe that that's how the world changes, how things happen, then you just say, the way we're going to get AI to where it needs to be is rip the Band-Aid off. Like tell, you know, this 19-year-old who goes online by the name Big Balls, I can't get over it. Like, tell Big Balls, “Get rid of all the air traffic controllers and have the AI do it. We're sure it's ready.” What will obviously happen since the AI doesn't actually work that well is a bunch of planes will crash.

 But if you're not going to be on those planes, what you're like, I am sure that within a couple of years, we're going to hear Elon Musk and Balaji people complaining about how the New York Times doesn't write enough stories about all the planes that don't crash. Right? Like they're just like the error rate will go up and people will die and be scared of flying in planes, but they'll say, no, no, we're just, six months away from the AI doing this beautifully. And then look at all the money we'll be saving. So I think we're headed to that.

 And there is a genuineness that like they have this innocent, very, very foolish notion of how science and technological progress work. And that is born on the backs of they're so rich that they must be smart. And now that they control everything, nobody can tell them, “No, that's really not how it works.” And, you know, it's okay if one of your startups fails, that doesn't really harm anything, anybody except the investors. It's not okay for air traffic control to fail.

 Like there's a real reason why we want zero accidents when it comes to plane flights. But since nobody can tell them no, we're just going to be stuck in a situation, at least for a few years, where planes crash more frequently. Because Elon thinks that just give it another six months and the AI will totally work it out.

 Gil Duran: So, move fast and crash planes. That's the new ethos of Silicon Valley and our AI wannabe overlords.

 Dave Karpf: I mean, it's not his plane, and he thinks that we're all, like everybody who's gonna die on it is a non-player character, so, is it really real anyway?

 Brooke Harrington: And these are people, they're notably over-representing engineers. I've spent a lot of my life around engineers and I like them a lot. I think like them, or at least that's what they tell me. However, I come from a humanities background. I studied literature and history, which is all about the things, the irrational things that people do and why, and why things like power and status are worth killing for. And so what I observe in these men who are openly contemptuous of history and literature and social science is that as Gil alluded to, they don't really understand how humans work and they are notably incurious about learning more. In fact, their whole attitude is, “If humans don't work the way I think they should, humans are wrong. My ideas remain.”

 And I always think in this context of a largely unknown Russian air defense officer named Stanislav Petrov. Does that name ring any bells? He is the guy who in 1983 prevented nuclear war because he wasn't an AI. He wasn't a computer. He was a low-level human exercising human judgment when when his automated systems in the Soviet Union gave a false alarm saying that there was an incoming nuclear attack from the US. What he was supposed to do if he behaved in a machine-like way is to hit the button that said, fire back nuclear missiles at the US. But he said, “Wait a second, should I really do that? Is this real?”

 And he weighed the chances of like, “Well, what would happen if it's wrong? What would happen if it's a false alarm? Is it worth it? Is it worth my career to try and prevent a false alarm attack?” And he prevented it. So like, that's why the three of us are here having this conversation and not like three-eyed mutants from Futurama squeaking at each other. We need more Stanislav Petrovs and fewer “Big Balls.”

 Gil Duran: It seems like, we need to examine this idea, the definition of efficiency. Efficient for whom? Efficient in what way? It's not efficient if government hurts people. It's not efficient if people have to die in plane crashes so a few billionaires can get rich. And I think that they're able to kind of control this language. That's why I've called it the Destruction of Government by Elon, not the Department of Government Efficiency.That's the Orwellian framing they're putting on it. But there's nothing efficient about what they're doing trying to dismantle the government. And I think people sometimes try to pose AI as if it will make a rational, neutral decision. But these things can be absolutely manipulated and prompted, and that will definitely be the idea. You know, I play around with LLMs a bit, and if I ask ChatGPT to describe me and my work, it gives a pretty bland, regular, normal definition. If I ask Grok, my life story is told from the position of Balaji Srinivasan, the Network State guy. Like, he's the number one person whose thoughts matter when you ask Grok about it, right? So there are different ideologies coming out of AI. And the idea is definitely to manipulate people toward ideological goals by pretending that that's what neutrality is. So efficiency is one of those things we really have to examine what it means. Because I think it's going to be very, very inefficient when we see what happens to the lives of regular people over the next few years.

 So now let's talk about the thing everybody kind of hates to do, and that is to try to guess what's coming next. Knowing full well that we're not predictive algorithms and that there's only so much we can see into the future, let's just talk about the general momentum of what's happening with these broligarchs these tech bros, these tech authoritarians, these tech fascists, these Network Staters, whatever we want to call them. There's many different names.

 Is this going to fail like previous libertarian tech authoritarian utopias like the technocracy movement in the 1930s? Will we still be talking about this stuff in two years or will they succeed? And it's just the way things are going to be now. Is this going to be the predominant? What would be your guess right now? What are their vulnerabilities? What are their strengths? And how do you think this is going to go if you had to say something in early 25?

 Dave Karpf: I'll go first. I think the model is not technocracy a century ago, but the great financial crash, what, 15 years ago. And that's because I think in two years we'll still be talking about this, not in terms of the like isolated cities that they want to set up. They're going be doing that less because they took over the United States. What we're going to be seeing for the next few years is lacking any regulators and lacking an IRS or an SEC or an FTC, we're gonna have a golden age of fraud and swindling. And then since the money eventually has to come from somewhere, not only will the plane start crashing, but the economy will crash too, right? Like eventually, if it is all swindles, reality intervenes. And then we're gonna have to deal with the wreckage. And I don't know how that'll work itself out, but my guess is that the number will keep going up for a while based on fraud. And then you have a very significant collapse and it's going to take quite a while to clean up the mess. My hope is that in the midst of cleaning up that mess, we recommit as a society, both to democracy and to the idea that government is there to help. That there is a role for government and for the public sector and that that leads to us to take those problems seriously and maybe in the future, we actually tax the oligarchs and we actually regulate the oligarchs and we have a society that's built for people instead of just wealth creation.

 Gil Duran: Thanks, Dave. Brooke.

 Brooke Harrington: Yeah, that's about the size of it. The way I would put it is we're all about to foot the bill for a bunch of indoor cats learning what outdoors is. And they may take down the country and turn the US into a failed state in the process. I dearly hope that they are stopped before it gets that far. But I think the other analogy is to what happened with the Silicon Valley Bank just a couple of years ago, where the broligarchs discovered the concept of FDIC insurance and they were outraged, outraged that the full amount of their deposits weren't federally insured. Like it had never bothered them before as long as it was NPCs losing money above the federal deposit insurance limit. But their deposits are special.

 The big lesson that was learned from the politics of the 2008 financial crisis is that some people and organizations are above the law. Some people get to crash the entire global economy. Some people get to bankrupt their companies and they will be bailed out at at the political will of our elected officials at taxpayer expense. And we don't get a choice in the matter unless we want to stage a revolution. And I think that's exactly what's going to happen here, except the price tag will be bigger because Trump is playing with factors that we weren't playing with in 2008. Like, hey, let's pull out of NATO and see what happens. Let's piss off Canada and Mexico and see what happens. So it's like we finally got the Jenga tower from the Big Short rebuilt and now Trump, like an ape on ketamine, is in there going like, “Let's pull this one out and this one out and this one out.” And Musk is in there helping him and Big Balls is in there pulling out a few more pieces. So the collapse is going to be bigger and harder. But the [result] is going to be the same, which is we're going to have to reach into our pocketbooks and pay for their mistakes. And my hope is that this time the lesson learned is don't let these assholes become that powerful in the future.

 The law applies to them too.

 Gil Duran: It's funny you should mention a tower, Jenga tower. I've been thinking of this lately through the lens of their some of them adopting this religious language is the Tower of Babel. They think they're going to build this perfect thing that's going to reach heaven and they'll be on the level of God or above everything. But I don't think it's going to work that way. I think that it's going to fall apart. They seem to really directly challenge the idea of hubris, of humility. They go against all the old myths about being too arrogant, about being too open, about your plans. I guess the question is whether we'll find out that they're right and that they just get to win and they are going to be the masters of the universe or whether all of those old myths and old stories come back to haunt them and it was obvious all along they were on the wrong track. think you know ego, the money is definitely a drug that deranges their senses as Dave was saying earlier. I think there are studies that show that nobody tells rich people the truth and so you get all these pseudo intellectuals spouting this garbage that would get them lapped out of any you know undergraduate classroom with smart kids in it. But everyone claps and bows and tells them that they're great and no one challenges them. And so then they are now on the national global stage, spouting these crazy things like that Plato never said. And, you know, they're misunderstanding everything and using that to forge these weird ideological ideas. So I'm hoping that it will, that their tower will collapse so that they will devolve and crumble.

 But I think there's no total guarantee of that and I think we will have to rebuild and learn a big lesson about the power of billionaires in society. As Louis Brandeis said, we can either have vast concentrations of wealth in this country or we can have a democracy. We can't have both and we're learning that lesson the hard way.

 So for our final thoughts here. What can people do? What should government politicians, regulators, people who care, what should they be doing right now? What's a way to counter the normalization of this sort of tech network state government idea? Dave, we'll start with you.

Dave Karpf: So if we're government and regulators, Europe is our last best hope. EU, please do what you can, even as the United States weaponizes NATO, because Peter Thiel has decided we ought to do that. But I mean, besides that, like, it's going to be a little while before – we have real regulators and or have courts that allow them to regulate even. Like we were in trouble before this election, we're in a lot more now. In the meantime, I think citizens should find outlets for protest and also outlets for ridicule. My background before I to academia was in political organizing. I was kind of raised on Saul Alinsky. Alinsky used to say that ridicule is your most potent weapon.

 That's a little less true these days since a lot of the people in power no longer have shame. Like it's very difficult to use ridicule against like Ted Cruz, because that guy is shameless. But like looking at the Tesla protests, it does seem that those Tesla take down protests are harming Tesla's stock value. And since so much of the wealth of tech is built up not based on their ability to make money, but their ability to look like the future and therefore make their speculative stock values go up? Like one of the things that can help is a pets.com type moment where people start judging these companies based on their ability to build products that actually people buy and use and pay for at a higher rate than they spend to make them. AI right now is really effective as a speculative technology and terribly expensive. Open AI just burns billions of dollars, but it's still speculatively worth all the money. So I think there's value in pointing out their flaws and noting that just because they're rich doesn't mean they're smart.

And there's value in protest to sort of signal that there's a shift coming. And then beyond that, we do in the United States have a political regime that is very excited to go weaponize against protesters, punish protesters. Trump last time wanted to shoot domestic protesters, the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs said no. We have a different Secretary of Defense and Joint Chiefs now, so I want us to take very seriously that we are living through genuinely scary times.

 But in the meantime, since we don't have government and we don't have regulators, what we have is public voice. And we can use that to raise an alarm, point out their flaws, and resist.

 Brooke Harrington: Yeah, building on that, ridicule, small acts of rebellion. There's a classic Herman Melville story called Bartleby the Scrivener that some people listening may have read. And it's about a man who just totally confounds an institution by every time he's asked to do any work, he says, “I would prefer not.”

 And when he was asked to leave because he won't do any work, he says, “I would prefer not.” And he just takes up residence under his desk. And as silly as that sounds, that small-scale non-compliance scaled up works amazingly well.

 To pull on an example some people may remember. Three years ago, there was a little tiny island called Snake Island that was attacked by a Russian warship. It was defenseless, essentially. The Russian warship rolls up on it and says, you know, “throw up your hands, put up the white flag”. And this guy named Roman Hrybov, sorry for mangling the Ukrainian pronunciation, he said, “Russian warship, go fuck yourself.” And they just refused to give in. And it didn't just stall the Russian warships takeover of Snake Island, it became this morale building exercise for everyone else. And there are small government agencies right now, I think it's the Agency for African Development that has been approached by DOGE or something, and they're just saying, well, why don't you come back when you have actual legal authority to tell us what to do? Have a nice day. And like, they're not being confrontational, they're acting like a whatever, an agency with a $40 million budget, they're the Snake Island of the federal government.

 But they're just going to make it as hard as possible for DOGE to do what it wants. Like, don't give them the secure database. Don't open the door to them. Don't comply. Be Bartleby. And finally, this is my little plea for the humanities again, building on something that Dave alluded to: Much what the tech bros have done in a sense by presenting themselves as the future – full stop – is they've colonized our imaginations. So it becomes impossible to imagine a world without them and without their stuff in it. But there are these whole fields of human endeavor that we call the arts where people have been devoted to imagining a different future. I hope this is an occasion to revisit things like human storytelling and human imagination, because one of the best weapons we have that essentially costs nothing is to imagine a different future, a better future, one that isn't full of hostile takeovers by malevolent rich people, but imagine something where humans can thrive and maybe live up to some of those fine words in the preamble to the Constitution about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

 Gil Duran: Definitely, I would agree. We have to find a way to tell a better story, right? It's important to outline what these guys are doing that's negative, what the attack is, but we also have to find ways to reconnect to other stories that don't involve them dominating. Because think a lot of people right now have the idea, well, they won, they've got it, what can we do? But I think there's a lot we can do. We have a tremendous amount of power and we have to start talking like that, I'd say.

 So I think that makes a lot of sense. one thing that in essay I mentioned at the beginning by John Robb, the military analyst who's pro network state and says that's what's happening. He wrote this essay, which I wrote about his essay, where he outlines all the vulnerabilities in this movement, the internal dissensions, the chaos, the destruction that's being caused. And my next piece of the Nerd Reich is going to be me putting on my strategic communications hat, which I don't put on very often, and reverse engineering a strategy to go straight at it and start to exploit the weaknesses, according to John Robb, pro-Network State military analyst.

 So that'll be coming up on the Nerd Reich soon. And thank you both for joining me, big fans of your work. And part of what we want to do here is create a conversation of people who are experts on this kind of stuff, who are also talking about it, and just to give people somewhere to go to hear from some reasonable smart people about what's really going on. So thank you both for joining us on the Nerd Reich podcast.