Silicon Valley’s midlife crisis (with Taylor Lorenz)

From shooting themselves up with boys’ blood to starting their own countries, “techno-optimism” has taken a decidedly dark turn. It turns out Silicon Valley is going through a midlife crisis — and while us peasants might address that with a motorcycle or a long vacation, the dudes in the PayPal Mafia are facing their mortality by inflicting pain on the rest of us. Taylor Lorenz joins the pod to dissect what’s caused so many billionaires to lose their minds, and the implications for humanity. Our guest Taylor Lorenz is a journalist. She hosts the podcast Power User, and writes about tech and online culture for her Substack, User Mag https://www.usermag.co/. You can follow her everywhere else @taylorlorenz. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for a membership at https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Want to sponsor Panic World? Ad sales & marketing support by Multitude ⁠http://multitude.productions⁠. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Researcher: Adam Bumas - Business Manager: Josh Fjelstad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Broderick?

  Can you run us through like real quick like the wackiest tech health startup pitches you've ever heard?

• 0:07Speaker 01

  So many, Ryan.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  I mean, they want to create these like nano robots that go into your body and clean up your cells and your disease. There's a lot of hormonal types of things. Of course, these are the same people that are against trans people taking hormones. But, you know, men taking hormones to optimize their body, there's totally, that's fine to make you taller, things like that. There's just a lot based around like youth and vitality, like regeneration, a lot of stuff around regenerative organs and regenerative, you know, regenerating your hairline, stuff like that.

• 0:45Ryan Broderick?

  Well, hold on, hold on. Let's not throw the baby out of the bathwater. Tell me more about that one, because I definitely.

• 0:59Ryan Broderick?

  I'm going to be controversial for a second. I believe we have some urgent issues that I wish were addressed obsessively and with ungodly amounts of money. But instead Silicon Valley has thrown ridiculous amounts of money into other shit. Mainly just a bunch of chaos that doesn't help anybody. Social media over the last decade hasn't been great. The metaverse is a thing that billionaires really want to happen, but it's not going to happen. And they also are obsessed with crypto and NFTs and all the other things. We haven't even talked about AI. But these initiatives, they're largely out of touch with most normal people, and I have a theory as to why.

• 1:37Ryan Broderick?

  And to help me break down this theory this week is our wonderful guest, Taylor Lorenz. Hi, Taylor, welcome.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:44Ryan Broderick?

  Are you ready to hear my, my, my theory about why Silicon Valley's gone off the rails?

• 1:49Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:50Ryan Broderick?

  About 10 men are having a profound midlife crisis and they're taking it out on the rest of us. That's my theory. What do you think?

• 1:57Speaker 01

  100%. 100% agree. Marc Andreessen, most notably Peter Thiel. I mean, name a famous Silicon Valley man. That's not having a midlife crisis.

• 2:08Ryan Broderick?

  Well, actually, we're gonna name a few today and how they're definitely trying to fight for immortality. But first, let me tee up the show here. Welcome to Panic World. My name is Ryan Broderick. It's a show about the various witch hunts, moral panics, and viral freakouts that bubble up out of the weirdest, most confusing corners of the internet. And today, we're gonna be talking about the men who are obsessed with, well, starting their own countries and living forever, the men who have the ear of our next president and possible future dictator, and the men who really want to use that proximity to shape the next government's agenda. Unfortunately, these are the people who, as the Onion phrased it, "suck at being a person and see a huge potential in AI."

• 2:51Ryan Broderick?

  This is part one of a series we'll probably be working on for quite a while, and we're gonna call this first one "Tech People Are Fucking Weirdos."

• 3:01Speaker 01

  Wait, my favorite thing recently, too, was the health, the guy who went viral on Twitter because he wanted to forever change his oral microbiome so that you would never have to get cavities again, by sort of training your, to release ethanol or some sort of alcohol. Like, your saliva would become alcohol and you would never get cavities. And many people that know about the dentistry world were like, "Okay, so that would actually probably give you throat cancer. So maybe don't do that."

• 3:30Ryan Broderick?

  There was a guy years ago, do you remember like the guy on Twitter who like tried to make his stomach into a brewery? Like, he tried to like...

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:38Ryan Broderick?

  And then he got like, he got really sick and he was constantly drunk and he had to like go to the hospital, I think, because he was like ingesting like yeast or something. Yeah, that was back when Twitter was good.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  Don't biohack. And again, these people will do nothing to mitigate disease, nothing to mitigate disease on a societal level, endless weird body hacking things to try to, yeah, optimize themselves.

• 3:59Ryan Broderick?

  I think my favorite is truly like, I just, I think it's like so insane is the men who like break their legs to become taller.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm obsessed. I'm on a whole Instagram community of them. And the thing is, Ryan, they become like two inches taller.

• 4:15Ryan Broderick?

  Like

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Like two inches taller.

• 4:16Ryan Broderick?

  They go through a year of physical therapy to become two to three inches taller, but their arms stay the same length. So they just look insane. They look

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Their torso stays, but their rest of their body stays the same length. They just have very abnormally long, like femurs or calves or whatever you call those, that bone. It's very, it's painful and it's sad, right? We should, we should accept short men, short kings. We love you. Don't do this to yourself.

• 4:39Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, being, being a short man is very in right now. Like there's like, these men don't need to do this to themselves. But of course it's like, like, these are the same guys that are gonna be like, I don't like when women have plastic surgery, but I'm gonna go smash the bones in my legs so I can get slightly taller.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  The jawline implants, you know?

• 4:55Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, those are

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Same energy.

• 4:56Ryan Broderick?

  Same energy. Um, so Taylor, how, how prevalent would you say the midlife crisis crisis in Silicon Valley is right now, based on your experience talking to some of these people?

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Very prevalent, very prevalent. I think they're all struggling. I think they're starting to feel their own mortality. That's why you're seeing all of them getting into longevity shit and, you know, siphoning off teenagers' bloods or injecting themselves with HGH. They're, I think, starting to realize that they might not be totally invincible and their time might be limited on this earth and they're just gonna inflict pain on the rest of us because of that. Like, they're all just completely losing their minds. I think COVID, when the pandemic started, also accelerated a lot of these

• 5:42Ryan Broderick?

  That's a good point.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Mental breakdowns.

• 5:44Ryan Broderick?

  So wait, you're saying it's unreasonable to take steroids to work at an email job? You think that that's like a crazy thing to do?

• 5:50Speaker 01

  Just jacking myself up before sitting, uh, you know, in my office on Sand Hill Road.

• 5:56Ryan Broderick?

  But before we get to sort of like how this midlife crisis is manifesting now, we wanna sort of start at the beginning. Uh, and so we're gonna talk about kind of like how these things are sort of bubbling up, starting around 2020. You actually kind of got it right. So in 2020, AI researcher Dr. Timnit Gebru was fired from Google, uh, after he expressed concerns about ethics inside the company. Do you know about this story? Have you heard this?

• 6:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. I remember this happening.

• 6:23Ryan Broderick?

  So do you, do you think there are ethical concerns inside of Google? You think that like, that's, that's probably realistic, right?

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there might be some ethical concerns with, um, you know, one of the biggest multi-billion dollar tech conglomerates entering into AI. There might be some ethical concerns there.

• 6:42Ryan Broderick?

  Unfortunately, Geburu did not sort of stick to like the the things you probably should care about ethically when it comes to companies like Google and has since kind of created a banner term for this very like sci fi movement like very popular in Silicon Valley. Do you know about the the acronym TESCRIL? Have you heard of this?

• 7:03Speaker 01

  No, actually. No.

• 7:06Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so it stands for transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosminism, rationalism, effective altruism, and long-termism.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Okay, I'm familiar with all of those genres, but did not realize there was an acronym to speak to this.

• 7:25Ryan Broderick?

  So many easily pronounceable isms in that acronym. And for listeners who don't know those words, congrats, you are more mentally healthy than Taylor and I. And we're gonna get to what they mean in just a minute. But Taylor, do you sort of subscribe to the same idea that like these guys, like that's sort of the banner that these guys are obsessed with, right?

• 7:43Speaker 01

  Undeniably. Yeah. I mean, they've, and yeah, Silicon Valley's always had weird tendencies. I mean, I went to like the Transhumanism Festival in Silicon Valley back in like 2013.

• 7:56Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, good lord.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  When people were putting microchips in their hands to open their garage doors.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  But it's gotten, I mean, it's gotten out of control, especially, I think, tied to the rise of crypto and some of these other technologies. It really kicked off in 2020.

• 8:11Ryan Broderick?

  The Washington Spectator in May 2023 wrote a little bit about this, and they summed up this way, which was, "Transhumanism proposes that humans should augment themselves by combining biological and synthetic technologies as a way of evolving our species. Extropianism", which is one that I did not know the word for, is the idea of expanding the human lifespan, perhaps infinitely. Singularitarianism suggests that technology will advance to a point where it begins to design itself, thus accelerating exponentially and leading to the singularity, or the irreversible explosion of intelligence and technological advancement. And these guys, like, they think that's like all real and possible and like, gonna happen, right?

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, it's so funny because they think it's gonna happen in our lifetimes when we can't even get ad tech to work correctly. It's out there. I mean, I think you have to be a bit of an idealist to work in Silicon Valley and to have these big ideas. I'm not against a lot of these big ideas generally. They could be used for good, but the way that these terrible tech people are pursuing them is not, it's not gonna manifest in any sort of utopia.

• 9:24Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. So, so I don't know like who from this world you've, you've met IRL, but like, could you sort of talk about what their, their vibes are like in person?

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Their vibes are terrifying. I've been around some of the VCs and, and people, and Peter Thiel in person. It's funny because it was before I became sort of like a villain to them. So I doubt that they remember me, but yeah, you cannot criticize them at all. Or their investments, or their investments. I think when I besmirched Clubhouse by saying like, hey, you guys could use a few more user safety features. They started setting up these rooms, which Marc Andreessen was a member of multiple rooms where they were talking about killing me, hanging me. It was Taylor Lorenz and other journalists that need to be hung.

• 10:13Ryan Broderick?

  Norma.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Their children. I mean, Elon banned me for reporting critically on him, exposing his lies. Like, they are the most thin-skinned weirdos. Marc Andreessen went on this newsletter with this far-right weirdo and where they were debating my orgasms. Like, they're just, they're total fucking creeps. They're total fucking creeps. And it's hilarious that I live, you know, so rent-free in their heads. But I think, I think that they, they just have palaces in their heads that are just filled with like, sort of grievances against people.

• 10:45Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's right. I think that they, they believe that they are heroes that are ushering in this new future. And if you point out that like, their shit is dumb and they suck, like, they get really mad.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Or if you just ask them a question about it.

• 10:57Ryan Broderick?

  Or that you just ask them basic details.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Basic details. Yeah.

• 11:01Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, as the Washington Spectator in this piece points out, there is an authoritarian bent to all of this. Like, it does.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:08Ryan Broderick?

  Like.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  And eugenics.

• 11:09Ryan Broderick?

  Totally.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  Very, fully eugenics. Like, let's be real. It's about like culling the weak and the species and building like a super race of humans.

• 11:18Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, based on like the lamest men in the world. Um, The New Republic kind of connected these dots too in a piece from this year where they wrote, "California fever," is what they called it, "allies suspiciously with a cultist dystopian movement to build so-called network states, private zones where tech zillionaires can abandon democratic society to live under the rule of their own private microgovernments." Which is a very interesting sort of like projection, I think, of like their own insecurities about their horrible bodies. Like, that's sort of my theory. It's like they can't, they want, they can't control their bodies, so they want to control like everything.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. Ultimate male eating disorder mentality.

• 11:58Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, exactly. Wait, you're not waking up at five in the morning to just like eat ground beef and bananas?

• 12:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 12:06Ryan Broderick?

  It's, it's interesting that you sort of mentioned like the basis of this in tech utopianism or like techno optimism. A historian who's been studying this named Quinn Slobodian wrote that despite Silicon Valley's talk of techno optimism in abundance, "Many tech plutocrats are plagued by a creeping sense of paranoia about the future. Fearing the possibility of civilizational collapse or driven by greed, megalomania, and the desire to have a 0% tax rate, some tech elites seek a retreat into bespoke fortress societies." This was something that I heard a ton about when I went to Bitcoin Miami, uh, right after the pandemic, like lockdown lifted.

• 12:46Ryan Broderick?

  And they were obsessed with building like completely self-sufficient, like suburban fiefdoms powered by Bitcoin. Like, that was like their big pitch. And they were gonna like take these to Sub-Saharan Africa and like create like a nation state there.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Do you ever watch the documentary, sorry to interrupt, Anarchapoco?

• 13:03Ryan Broderick?

  No, never heard of this.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  Oh, you have to watch it. This documentary is amazing because it documents how these Bitcoiners basically all moved to Acapulco and tried to create Acapulco into this Bitcoin state. Multiple, there's, there's multiple John Galt, there's a Juan Galt, there's a Juanita Galt. They've all named themselves after Ayn Rand characters. Multiple people end up dead. It's, it's just, it's just a perfect sort of like unintentional comedy almost of, of how these sort of network states end up playing out.

• 13:35Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, and it's like, it's very fascinating that they're talked about almost in the same breath as biohacking and transhumanism because like, I think it's the same impulse, right? And it's very fascinating that they're talked about in almost the same breath as biohacking and transhumanism. And I think it's the same impulse, right? And today, I mainly wanted to focus on three guys who I believe are fending off their midlife crisis in similarly toxic ways. Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Brian Johnson. So let's start with everyone's favorite middle-aged teenager and sentient jar of mayonnaise with abs, Brian Johnson. Are you familiar with Brian Johnson?

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Very familiar, of course, yes.

• 14:14Ryan Broderick?

  In, uh, last year, in a Time Magazine piece written by Charlotte Alter, they wrote, "Brian Johnson, 46, is a senti-millionaire," which does not mean millionaire with 100 hands, "a tech entrepreneur who has spent most of the last three years in pursuit of a singular goal: don't die. He's spent more than $4 million developing a life extension system called Blueprint in which he outsources every decision involving his body to a team of doctors. That system includes, oh my God, downing 111 pills a day, just like me in college, uh, wearing a baseball cap that shoots a red light into his scalp, collecting his own stool samples, sleeping with a tiny jetpack attached to his penis to monitor his nighttime erections.

• 14:56Ryan Broderick?

  And Johnson thinks any act that accelerates aging like eating a cookie or getting less than eight hours of sleep is an act of violence."

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Except not really, because he doesn't take any steps to mitigate disease in the slightest, and has embraced full anti-vaxxer mentality of...

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Getting infection is good. This is a man that got COVID, lost 40% of his lung capacity, and has taken absolutely zero steps to prevent himself from getting COVID or any other disease over and over again. It is so, it's just so perfect because it's just like, these men could take pretty basic steps to mitigate pretty major diseases. Like, they have the level of privilege where like, they really don't have to get sick that often and like, they could live a long and healthy life. But instead, they are repeatedly exposing themselves to pathogens, taking no precautions, and then trying to like, biohack their way out of it. It's like, dude, just open a window and get some fresh air. Like, come on, you know?

• 15:55Ryan Broderick?

  Taylor, you, you don't have to mask if you're wearing a tiny jetpack on your penis and measuring directions.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  What?

• 16:01Ryan Broderick?

  You're totally fine. A little background on Johnson, for our listeners who might not be familiar with him. He's from Utah. He's an ex Mormon, and he-

• 16:11Speaker 01

  God, there's always a Mormon root. I didn't even know that.

• 16:13Ryan Broderick?

  Always, always a Mormon root. He founded a payment processing company called Braintree in 2007, which was, which, that company acquired Venmo, and then that was all sold to PayPal. And PayPal is gonna be a big character in our episode today because the PayPal mafia is essentially the guys we're talking about. Like, all of these, like, we don't like banks, we wanna make our own bank that's also a country, guys. Like, that's, that's what this is. Johnson received $300 million when it was all sold to PayPal. And it was overwhelming, apparently, to be that rich. He says he gained 50 pounds, became depressed, and then he divorced his wife who had cancer, and decided that he was gonna live forever.

• 16:57Ryan Broderick?

  Not her, but he's, he's gonna fix it for himself, which I just think is the most telling detail here.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  I, like, literally, this is like, ChatGPT could write this profile of this man.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  And also, just, it's, I think he's like, has a weird relationship with his son, too, right? Like, his son's like, the blood giver? Or he doesn't take his son's blood, or something?

• 17:21Ryan Broderick?

  Well, I know that they take a lot of shirtless photos together, uh, which, like, that's cool. Like, I wish me and my dad, like-

• 17:28Speaker 01

  No hate to the son, by the way. I cannot imagine, like, no hate. But I feel like I'd read at some point, maybe I'm confusing him with Peter Thiel. There's definitely teenage blood, you know, being exchanged in some sort of Silicon Valley circles.

• 17:40Ryan Broderick?

  We're gonna get to Peter Thiel and the boy blood thing in just a little bit. Um, so, Johnson, uh, this is from the Time article again. His goal was to make his 46-year-old organs look and act like 18-year-old organs. And Johnson says the data compiled by his doctors suggests that Blueprint, uh, which is like the name for this project, has so far given him the bones of a 30-year-old and the heart of a 37-year-old.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  What?

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Also, his measurements, as many have pointed out, are based on, like, nonsense. Like, there's no, like, one true way to, like, measure your biological age in any sort of reliable way. I mean, you can sort of measure certain metrics that are associated with aging, but his whole thing of, like, "I have 30-year-old bones and 35-year-old heart," or whatever, it's like, it's just, it's all very dubious.

• 18:32Ryan Broderick?

  I'm also getting an update from our producer, Grant, that, uh, yeah, you are correct. Brian Johnson was getting blood from his son to make him younger, but apparently he stopped doing it because he didn't see any impact.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Knew it.

• 18:45Ryan Broderick?

  So, I guess his son's blood just wasn't good enough. Um, hey, it happens. Fathers and sons have a complicated relationship.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:53Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Very cool. Um, according to this Time piece, Johnson's house was described as an apple store in the jungle. And the journalist was given a special chocolate that she said tasted like a foot, and a drink that tasted like Sandy Gatorade.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  What is the point of living when you're living like this? I don't understand.

• 19:14Ryan Broderick?

  You, yeah, I, that's, that's the thing that I really can't wrap my head around. It's like, why would you want to live forever if your life is this horrible? Like, what's the point? Um, here, I want to play a little game with you, with our audience, to, can you, uh, do your best to describe the before-and-after photos of Brian Johnson that I just put in the chat for you? Take a look at these?

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  Okay, this looks like one of those, this looks like one of those like Twitter threads of like, what, what do they say, like what estrogen did for me or something?

• 19:51Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  Like, he, he, he looks, he, he, he just, I don't want to call it a glow up, but he, like, he looked totally normal before. His before picture is completely normal. He just looks like a normal guy.

• 20:05Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  His after picture, like, his skin, first of all, he's dressed in kind of weird clothing, but I don't even think he looks younger. Like, he looks, I don't know, he's very strange. He looks like, honestly, like a, a character, like an extra on The Matrix.

• 20:25Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, that's what I was gonna say. He looks like he just jacked out of The Matrix, and now you're like, you're seeing the real him, and he's like, wearing like, you know, like, future fetish gear kind of stuff.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:34Ryan Broderick?

  That's what it looks like. Um, I got one more photo of him for you, for you to describe for the audience here.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  One funny thing is like, I don't even know if he's into the like, natural fibers thing, but like, there's this whole like, health movement around like, natural fibers and like, you know, the plastic in your clothes is killing you and stuff.

• 20:49Ryan Broderick?

  Oh my god.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  But these like, futuristic health freaks are all like, in the most like, synthetic getups ever. Like, it's just, it's so funny like, where their different lines are drawn. Okay, sorry, you said there was one more?

• 21:01Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, right beneath it. So yeah, just sort of like, describe like, the general color of this man's skin.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Oh god.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  It's, it's blue.

• 21:16Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  It's, it's blue. He is, I mean, he looks like he's actually been drained of blood, and he's sort of holding the blood vial that has been like, removed from him. He looks very pale. I feel like he has some sort of... Wasting disease, like a Victorian child, you know? Like, I want his lead levels tested.

• 21:38Ryan Broderick?

  He, he looks like a wax statue of himself.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:43Ryan Broderick?

  That's melting, kind of. Like, he looks melted.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Time comes for us all, and whatever this man is doing is extending his life in potentially such marginal ways, you know? And every time also, every time like these like centurion people are interviewed, you know, they're always like, "I eat a chocolate bar a day and take a glass of whiskey." You know, like, so much of longevity is like, I think, just like, not being stressed? And this seems like a very stressful lifestyle.

• 22:10Ryan Broderick?

  There is a woman in southern Italy alive right now who will live twice as long as this guy. And she will do it by drinking red wine every day. And like, smoking a pack of cigarettes.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  And just like, having a great time with her, with like, in the palazzo.

• 22:24Ryan Broderick?

  They'll be asked, like, "How did you live so long?" And she'll be like, "Well, my husband died, so I'm a lot less stressed than I used to be. So now I'm 110 years old."

• 22:35Ryan Broderick?

  I do want to be clear, because he's gone on the record saying this several times, that he does not color his hair, but he has a gray hair reversal concoction. That's the quote that he uses. He uses some kind of concoction that isn't hair dye.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  It's a concoction hair dye?

• 22:52Speaker 01

  The concoction has a series of dyes in it.

• 22:55Ryan Broderick?

  So, obviously, we both think that this man looks like he's been dead for several years and washed ashore of some kind, you know, on a beach somewhere. But I did want to bring in a professional voice here. So, Dr. Nir Barzagli, the director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, said, "He looked sick. He was pale. I don't know what he did with his face." Dr. Barzagli adding that he was alarmed by Johnson's lack of fat, which plays an important role in the body. And the doctor said, "All these M.D.s, we all kind of agreed that he didn't look so great."

• 23:40Speaker 01

  He doesn't.

• 23:41Ryan Broderick?

  You know, but you know, you can't, you can't come, you can't deny the results, which is that Johnson says that he gets the erections, the erection rate of an 18 year old when he sleeps, which is how he's been measuring his health. Did you know about this?

• 23:57Speaker 01

  So like male. I mean, it's just like, it's such a like male ego way to measure your health and vitality. It's not even about like.

• 24:07Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, I'm getting another correction from our producer Grant that just, just this year, Brian Johnson posted on Twitter that his nighttime erections are now better than an 18 year old. That's great, man. That's, congrats on the gooning.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  Is his sperm aging in reverse too? Like, who cares if you're getting hard if you're shooting, you know, six year old sperm? Like, it's just that these people, I don't know.

• 24:34Ryan Broderick?

  It's.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  Good luck to him.

• 24:36Ryan Broderick?

  It's, it's not just about boners. It's about ideology and sort of like making them all fit together. And obviously, like, the whole deal with him is, is, is an obsession with immortality. And that bleeds over to like his beliefs about technology too. You know, he believes that artificial intelligence is, quote, "the most significant event in this part of the galaxy." Oh, fucking God.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  In this part of the galaxy. Okay.

• 25:00Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, so annoying. Sure. And he really does believe that the entire world will be optimized by algorithms and he wants an algorithm for his body. And it's once again, this idea of like, I'm going to police my own body and then I'm going to police the rest of the planet in the same way. It is an authoritarian idea. I really think so.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's about control and optimization and maximizing, you know, every inch of your body and like every morsel of food you eat and, ugh, just sounds, yeah.

• 25:36Ryan Broderick?

  He, this is one last piece from the Times piece, which is very good. So it reads, whether we're talking about falling in love or having sex or going to the baseball game, you're talking about biochemical states in the body. And he says, we should be willing to divorce ourselves from all human custom, everything, all philosophy, all ethics, all morals, all happiness, which is what cult leaders say, I think, right before, like, they forced you to commit mass suicide.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Quite literally. This is so authoritarian and dark and crazy. And none of these things, it's so interesting how these men just view themselves through the lens of individualism and like, it's like, nowhere is he talking about the potential for humanity and

• 26:16Ryan Broderick?

  No.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  You know, protecting people that are vulnerable or disabled or sick or whatever. You know, it's like, yeah, it's just all about him.

• 26:25Ryan Broderick?

  You and I have talked about this before, sort of the idea of like, like the very sexist idea of writing off like, when women are influencers and you know, it's like totally regarded as frivolous, but these guys are doing the exact same thing. For instance, Brian Johnson was using all of this to sell olive oil. You could buy a $75 bottle of olive oil and it of course sold out because he's literally just a wellness grifter. Like, that's the whole thing.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  That is what this is. And if a woman was doing this, by the way, they would institutionalize her.

• 26:58Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  And women are like-

• 27:00Ryan Broderick?

  They would bring back the lobotomy. They'd be like, absolutely not.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Truly.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  And they would be like, she's obsessed with age and her youth and she's so desperate to preserve her youth. And meanwhile, yeah, these men are just trying to like, you know, age rank their liver state or whatever.

• 27:20Ryan Broderick?

  Johnson is not alone in this sort of idea of like, an obsession with the body, an obsession with creating your own nation state and a, just a true love of grifting. And we're going to be talking in just a second about possibly the biggest one of these guys, the most important one of these guys. His name is Peter Thiel. He's a gokler killer. He's J.D. Vance's puppet master. He loves building countries on oil rigs in the middle of the ocean. He's possibly, literally a vampire. And we're going to be very careful about what we say about him because Thiel is very litigious. So we're just going to stick to the facts and we're going to do all of that when we come back from the break.

• 28:10Ryan Broderick?

  Taylor, question for you. When did Peter Thiel appear on your radar? When did you sort of like, when was like the first time you remember encountering him?

• 28:20Speaker 01

  I met him at the Press Club in Washington DC when I was covering some talk that he was giving in, I think, I can't remember if it was before or after the election. It was either 2016 or 2017. And I kind of knew who he was at that point because he had played a bigger and bigger role in politics. I mean, I would say he came into my world more in like the early 20, early to mid 2010s. Obviously, his spat with Gawker and then sort of his political activities just put him on my radar.

• 28:49Ryan Broderick?

  So for our listeners who are not familiar with this guy, here's the Spark Notes. He graduated from Stanford, even though he spends like all of his adult life complaining about higher education. He co-authored a book called The Diversity Myth. Have you ever seen this book or anything about it?

• 29:04Speaker 01

  I've seen it and certainly not read it.

• 29:07Ryan Broderick?

  No, no, it's exactly what you think it is. He uses part of the book to defend the use of homophobic slurs. He is an out gay man, but like that hasn't stopped him from being an absolutely massive reactionary. And his main focus is not really a cultural crusade at the beginning of his career. It's finance. So he starts working at PayPal in the late 90s with a programmer named Max Levchin. And the two sound pretty cool to hang out with. Here's a quote from a 2011 New Yorker feature. "I'm addicted to hanging out with smart people," Levchin said, "and I found myself craving more time with Peter." While developing the first prototype for PayPal, Levchin and Thiel tried to stump

• 29:52Ryan Broderick?

  each other with increasingly difficult math puzzles. How many digits does the number 125,100 have? 210. "It was a bit like a weird courting process, nerds trying to oppress each other," Levchin said. That sounds great. I would love to be-

• 30:11Speaker 01

  How would it get kicked out of that friend group so fast?

• 30:13Ryan Broderick?

  I think that would be a good thing. Here is how David Sacks, another PayPal guy, and a guy who was most recently embarrassed at the RNC, described Peter Thiel when he was younger. "He would demolish your arguments in five minutes," Sacks said. "It was like playing chess." He was a libertarian, but he would ask questions like, "Should there even be a market for nuclear weapons?" He would drill down and find the weakness in your argument. He does like to win. Wow, an argumentative libertarian? I've never heard of such a thing.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's... He sounds insufferable, if I'm being honest.

• 30:51Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, he does. And when he was at PayPal, he met a couple other important people in our story today, Elon Musk being one of them. They create the payment program. They sell it to eBay for $1.5 billion. Peter Thiel walks away with $55 million. And in 2004, he invests in Facebook. In 2012, when Facebook goes public, he makes a shitload of money. By 2016, he's estimated to be worth $3 billion. And he's basically spent most of that money investing in like, global extremism.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:25Ryan Broderick?

  Which brings, and like, sort of trying to undermine global democracy. Which brings us to seasteading. So you already mentioned this before. Sort of walk us through like, the basics of like, the seasteading movement.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, seasteading is essentially this movement of a lot of crypto-libertarian types people that want to go off and create these, essentially little nation-states on the sea. Like, I think they envision them as these like, platforms, like, almost up in the middle of areas where there's currently no boundaries. Like, I think the laws are different at sea, so you're not maybe bound by things like US government forcing you to pay taxes. And so, you know, they've sort of endeavored to, yeah, to sort of colonize the sea.

• 32:09Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, they want to go to international waters where there are no laws technically, and they can do whatever they want. In 2008, Peter Thiel gave half a million dollars to the Seasteading Institute, with the hopes of using these platforms in the ocean to just like, not pay tax, like, live there and not pay taxes. It kind of didn't go anywhere. In 2009, though, he penned an essay saying, "I no longer believe that economic freedom and democracy are compatible", which is, I think, a real tell about what this is.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:38Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Have you heard of the terms like dark enlightenment or like neo-reactionism?

• 32:42Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah. Just in the context of these people and their sort of ideologies.

• 32:48Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's very similar to like stuff that Steve Bannon has talked about, this idea of like, if you can use technology to smash the federal government and replace it with like your own setup, you can like live like a king. That's that's sort of the idea. So some more here from Peter Thiel's letter, which is, since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women to constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians have rendered the notion of a capitalist democracy into an oxymoron. So yeah, he's literally just saying like, because of women, like, we can't, we can't have a democracy.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  He's saying the quiet part out loud.

• 33:24Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. He doesn't want women to vote. Can you, you sort of touched on it, and I want to circle back to sort of like Peter Thiel's invisible hand over Silicon Valley over the last 15 years. Like, how would you say he's kind of shaped the progress of that whole culture?

• 33:40Speaker 01

  I think Peter Thiel has really ideologically led the way in sort of like radicalizing his colleagues in Silicon Valley. I think he was sort of, I mean, he was one of the original, he was sort of one of the original Silicon Valley extremists. And then he ended up kind of building this universe around himself. Obviously, you mentioned like the PayPal stuff. There is the PayPal mafia. Obviously, Elon Musk was also part of that group. But it's really just this group of really rich men that got rich back in the late 90s, early 2000s, and have become increasingly politically extreme on the right. But they're more extreme than conservative. Like, it's a very self-interested

• 34:23Speaker 01

  ideology. Like, if the conservative movement was enacted completely, but it didn't benefit them directly enough, they would abandon it. Like, they, their

• 34:31Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  Politics are solely based around sort of their own personal net gain.

• 34:36Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's literally just like, we don't want to pay taxes, and we don't want to like, have to deal with anyone's laws. Like, that's, that's

• 34:43Speaker 01

  And we don't want any criticism. Let's not forget that, too.

• 34:46Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. And I want to be clear, like, this podcast, we're not criticizing you, Peter, if you're listening. I love you.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  This is fan behavior.

• 34:53Ryan Broderick?

  Please do not sue me.

• 34:57Ryan Broderick?

  And in the, and in the, uh, the effort to be fair to Peter Thiel, um, we did some research. He did not receive boy blood. That, that was a miss, that was a miscellaneous report. Um, in fact, he's got on the record with the New York Times saying, I want to publicly tell you that I'm not a vampire. On the record, I am not a vampire.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Always great when you gotta say that.

• 35:21Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. You know, you're in a really good spot ideologically when you have to repeatedly tell the New York Times that you're not drinking people's blood. He is, I think mainly best thought of as sort of like the mysterious benefactor of like lots of stuff, but he's also tied into the same kind of transhumanism and weird health stuff as Brian Johnson, right? Like he's obsessed with resurrecting the woolly mammoth. Um, and he spent $7 million on like herpes vaccine experiments.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 35:50Ryan Broderick?

  Um, yeah. He, I mean, how would you sort of, how would you sort of connect this idea of like, like ideological selfishness with like a distrust of medicine or like a desire to overhaul all this stuff? Like how, how does that sort of connect for you?

• 36:06Speaker 01

  They don't really believe in modern medicine. They, they think that they can optimize themselves out of cancer. Like they, they, this goes back to, I'm surprised to hear that he even invested in vaccines only because this crowd has gotten super anti-vax, um, really in the past couple of years. Um, if you listen to their podcasts, like the All In podcast, the David Sacks stuff, like they've really moved pretty far to the right on that stuff. Um, but it's this idea of like health as a commodity and they think that they can sort of like purchase or invest their way into good health. And it's a very, it's a very broken view of health too, because it's about consumption. It's about like eating the right things or doing the right, like, yeah, red light treatment or whatever. It's,

• 36:47Speaker 01

  it's individualism. It's not about like recognizing that public health is important. Our society is interconnected. Disease mitigation from a public health perspective is important. Like they think they can sort of like opt out of all of that because they're rich. And to some extent they can, but not completely because they still have to live in society and the world and they can't just be completely isolated.

• 37:12Ryan Broderick?

  Do you think that ties into like this desire for like health? I mean, I think health startup culture is largely based on like the lack of like good health insurance in America, but I, but do you think it's also tied to this idea of like, someone's gonna make the startup that helps Peter Thiel like fully remove himself from the global biome, you know?

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's just such an ideal of like health supremacy and, and this idea that they are like the master race, right? They've evolved past us. They don't have to deal with these silly little diseases. And this ultimately, it's so funny because it shows their fallacy. Like when these people, like these people are gonna get the flu or COVID or whatever, or HIV or anything, like they can get any sort of disease that anybody else can get. They're not subject to, you know, to the same level of risk as all of us, but you can't biohack your way out of certain diseases like cancer in some ways, right? Like, there's only a certain amount of treatments, but they, but they believe that, that money will absolve them, that they will, that they will get treatment, that they won't have to die. And they cannot accept that.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  They, they have to, they have to believe that enough money and investment that they can opt out of that. And they can't. That's the irony and it's hilarious, but they're gonna try.

• 38:26Ryan Broderick?

  I also, I also think there's like a fear of irrelevance with them.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:30Ryan Broderick?

  Where like, cause they do wanna be removed, but they obviously wanna like control how we live.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 38:35Ryan Broderick?

  And so like with, with Peter Thiel, it's really interesting where like, you know, he's investing in Facebook and he's got this huge sort of imprint on, you know, we can talk about how bad Facebook is all day, but it changed the entire world. Like it changed everything. But now I sort of look at these guys like Thiel and I think like, oh, you reinvented the world once, you no longer understand it and it really freaks you out. And so you're spending all of your time trying to change it again.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  Yes, that's why they're so obsessed with like online culture. And I think why they've gotten really online the past couple of years. Like I think that they are starting to feel their irrelevance. And that's why you have Elon tweeting memes that are the worst things you've ever seen. Cause it's like, it's that desperate attempt at cultural relevance, at the type of cultural relevance that frankly, only young people have, you know, like people that you can't have that when you're a billionaire.

• 39:26Ryan Broderick?

  I'm so glad you brought up Elon Musk because right after the break, that's who we're gonna be talking about next.

• 39:43Ryan Broderick?

  Obviously, there's a lot to choose from, but what would you say was the most epic Elon Musk moment for you? What's one that you just come back to?

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Let's see, I mean, when he wiped $20 billion off Twitter's balance sheet, the evaluation, and all the banks are fucked now because of it. So many great, yeah, so many great moments, but...

• 40:04Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I like when he wore the cowboy hat backwards at the border, like he went down.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Oh my god, yes.

• 40:10Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, and it's like clearly no one told him that it's backwards. I really enjoyed that one. Let's, you know, we all kind of have a decent idea of like what Elon's been up to over the last 15, 20 years, but let's do a quick little timeline, huh? So, um, his first big splash was PayPal. By all accounts, he wasn't much of an ideologue. He just was like a rich South African guy. He donated $2,000 to both Bush and Kerry in 2004. He donated to Hillary and Obama in 2008. In 2015, he said that Trump would be embarrassing if he was nominated, and he kind of didn't do much for 2016. In 2017 is when he starts courting Republicans, but he's still outspoken about climate change.

• 40:56Ryan Broderick?

  In 2016, though, also, I think there's like a very important moment for Elon Musk. Do you remember the Elon Musk hot tub simulation quote at the Recode conference?

• 41:06Speaker 01

  No.

• 41:08Ryan Broderick?

  So, a reporter in the crowd like asks Elon Musk about like simulation theory, and he talks about like how him and his brother would like sit in a hot tub

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah!

• 41:16Ryan Broderick?

  and like debate if we live in a simulation.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Yes, I do actually remember that. I forgot about that.

• 41:22Ryan Broderick?

  And it goes like mega viral.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:25Ryan Broderick?

  And like my dad was sending me like videos about it.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:28Ryan Broderick?

  And I think like, I think that's the moment where Elon Musk realized like it was powerful to be viral. Like, I don't think he totally clocked it, because like before that, he's like in Iron Man. He's like a traditional celebrity. And then after 2016, he's like, "I'm the meme man."

• 41:42Speaker 01

  I think, but I, yeah, right. I also think the cave, remember when he wanted to rescue the children from the cave and kind of ended up interfering and... Destroying it like I also think that was a radicalization moment because he got so kind of angry that people could know more about things than him or that like and he was being sort of dismissed and mocked and demeaned and I don't know these people's egos are so fragile I can't remember what year that was.

• 42:10Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, don't worry because we've got it. So in 2018, he meets and starts dating Grimes. This is also when he goes on the Joe Rogan podcast. This is the era, I think, where everything starts to click in and we start to see the creation of the current Elon Musk that we all know and love. This is when he smokes weed on the podcast and everyone's like, oh my God, that's so epic. This is where he starts being a lot more vocal about politics. This also seems to be around the time he starts to radicalize around trans issues because of his daughter coming out as trans. And by 2020, he's tweeting about taking the red pill and saying that pronouns suck because he doesn't know what those are. And this is

• 42:54Ryan Broderick?

  also where Grimes is publicly complaining that he's sending her like far right shit and saying, this is where she tweets like, is this from 4chan or something? You're actually starting to sound like someone from the far right. And I think that this also kind of lines up with him having a midlife crisis, to be very honest.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  Yes, 100%.

• 43:08Ryan Broderick?

  He's like dating, he's got like an elf wife and he's like going on like edgy podcasts and he's like sending people like racist memes. I don't know.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  No one has been more desperate for relevance than Elon Musk. Like, no one has like craving validation. He wants to be seen as cool.

• 43:26Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  Like, it's not enough to be the richest and most powerful person. Like, he wants this like, cool, like hip, like I'm with it factor that he'll never have because he's a billionaire and he's a fascist.

• 43:39Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. He's also similarly to Thiel and Johnson in a way, both obsessed with transhumanism and creating his own nation state, except he's not wanting to build it in the ocean. He wants to go to Mars. But it's the exact same impulse, I think. He said that by 2024, SpaceX would be landing on Mars, which was then moved to 2026. And now he's saying we'll have a colony there by 2050. I think, I think, I think, I think we'll get it. You know, I think we'll do it. This is, this is a quote from him that I find very inspiring. Terraforming will be too slow to be relevant in our lifetime. However, we can establish a human base there in our lifetime. There being Mars.

• 44:20Ryan Broderick?

  At least a future spacefaring civilization discovering our ruins will be impressed humans got that far.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  Okay, no, they won't. Everyone's gonna die of climate change and forget that. Like, I don't see this happening in our lifetimes, unfortunately.

• 44:36Ryan Broderick?

  Well, that is a fantastic point because like he is clearly like, he understands that climate change is real. Like, deep in his heart, he knows that that's real. He's now like pretending he doesn't care because like it's not politically useful for him. But instead of like, working on that, he wants to become a multi-planetary society, as he keeps saying. Because like for him, once again, it's not about like helping the rest of us. It's totally selfish.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  A hundred percent because it's all motivated by selfishness. It's all like, well, us, us superior people will run off to Mars and you pores can, you know, rot here on Earth.

• 45:08Ryan Broderick?

  No, we can accrue a ton of debt getting to Mars and then work as slaves. That's, that seems to be one of his plans.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  The true dream.

• 45:15Ryan Broderick?

  Did you ever like fall, like, was there a moment where you like, you regarded Elon Musk as like, at least like a smart guy? Like, did you, did that work on you?

• 45:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I just sort of regarded him as, I think I was like pretty neutral on him. But I remember when he offered to help the people in the caves.

• 45:33Ryan Broderick?

  This was 2018, when a Thai youth soccer team were trapped in caves for over two weeks?

• 45:39Speaker 01

  And it was so quickly became clear that he is an egomaniac that had no idea what he's talking about, that I was like, oh, this man is an idiot.

• 45:45Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, the caves thing for me was also like, what? Like, because up until that point, I just sort of knew him as like, kind of like the same as like, um, what is that guy's name?

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Richard Branson?

• 45:57Ryan Broderick?

  Neil deGrasse Tyson too, though, like.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  Yes, like those types of people where you're like, oh, they're science. They know about rockets, like.

• 46:03Ryan Broderick?

  He's like a science fan on the internet.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  A science man. And then, then you realize he knows nothing about science, by the way.

• 46:09Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  Or engineering.

• 46:10Ryan Broderick?

  Nothing. And this sort of selfish impulse to take us to space instead of fixing the planet we live on now, you know, dovetails quite nicely with his other weird obsession, which is breeding women that work for him. So how mu- so can you sort of describe like the the pattern of behavior that that it seems to be happening with Elon Musk and his various female employees over the last decade?

• 46:33Speaker 01

  He wants to reproduce. He said that, you know, women in his companies that are seeking sperm for IVF, he will be, he will father their children so that they can have, you know, biologically superior children. And obviously, he has many, many kids. He has spoken constantly about the need for people to have lots of kids. And he has definitely some sort of weird breeding fetish shit, which is linked to his ego, undeniably.

• 47:00Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, wouldn't you want Elon Musk's superior genetics in your family tree? A man who looks like he's made of mayonnaise, just like an absolute Ubermensch?

• 47:11Speaker 01

  With zero social skills and...

• 47:15Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. And it also ties into like some race theory stuff that he's become a little more vocal about over the years. In 2024, this year, earlier this year, he tweeted, "The problem with great replacement theory is that it fails to address the foundational issue of low birth rates. Record low birth rates are leading to population collapse in Europe and even faster population collapse in most of Asia. Immigration is low in Asia, so there is no replacement going on. The countries are simply shrinking away. If this doesn't turn around, then any countries on earth with low birth rates will become empty of people and fall into ruin like the remains we see of many long-dead civilizations."

• 47:54Ryan Broderick?

  It is obvious, though, that he is talking about like white people birth rates.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes, yes. Because he doesn't speak this way about the global South, or Africa, or India, or anything. Like, it's it's an obsession with, yeah, just reproducing. I mean, just it's white supremacy through and through. Also, he doesn't want to do anything to make women's lives easier so that they can give birth, right? Like, he's not interested in advocating for paid maternity leave, right? He doesn't even give these benefits to some of his own workers. So... He doesn't actually care about bringing children into the world and fostering healthy children's lives. It's just, it's authoritarianism.

• 48:35Ryan Broderick?

  Right. And the switch, but like, we can argue all day if you really like felt this way 10 years ago and he was hiding it or not, but like, the switch has been pretty drastic from like this, this 2018 year that we're kind of timestamping this on. So I want to show you two old Elon Musk tweets that are very interesting and I want you to read them for, for the audience here. So I just sent you one in the chat.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 48:59Ryan Broderick?

  This is, this is from June 2018 from Mr. Musk.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. I can't believe he posted this. So back in 2018, he posts, "Don't buy our car if that's a problem. People should be free to live their lives where their heart takes them." Rainbow emoji. So he's basically saying like, if you're homophobic, don't buy a Tesla.

• 49:17Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Now it's like, buy a Cybertruck and you can run over trans people with it.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:22Ryan Broderick?

  Here's another tweet from Mr. Musk in 2018. This is from the same month, actually.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. So he's quote tweeting a Tesla tweet that says, "Very proud to have scored 100 out of 100 for the fourth year in a row in LGBTQ equality. Thanks to everyone at Tesla for making LGBTQ inclusion an important part of our culture."

• 49:43Ryan Broderick?

  It's, it's just so crazy to think about because by 2021, he is tweeting things like, "Trace Root Woke Mind Virus." And like, it is a fascinating, I think your theory at the top of the episode that this is tied to COVID is absolutely crucial. Like, it's something that like, I don't think is talked about enough that these guys were just alone with themselves for a year and like went insane.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Also, the state, let's not forget, Elon fought viciously to keep his factories open to fight the fact that people were dying of COVID in 2020. He, this is like when they, all these people were like, "What do you mean? I have to close down my production and potentially lose a couple of dollars because we're in the midst of a deadly global pandemic." Like, it was, this was such a like affront to him. I think that it, and so many of these other businesses too, like they were so angry that they couldn't, basically again, that they had to deal with something that was affecting everyone in the world because in their mind... They should be excluded from things like this, like global pandemics or disease and death.

• 50:45Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  And I think they spend too much time online. This is also when Clubhouse was peaking. Let's not forget Elon was very active on their

• 50:52Ryan Broderick?

  They all were.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  market entries. They were all like glued to that app.

• 50:55Ryan Broderick?

  And I think like it did become like this echo chamber. And when we talk about like the malaise that we all kind of feel about like the internet now, I do think a large chunk of the blame goes to these guys for just like not letting, like they want to stay in control, but they have no idea what any real person wants or cares about anymore. So we just like, we just cycle through these like hype, boom and bust things that don't go anywhere.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, we're just, they also just try to like manufacture their own thing. It's like, they can't control the internet. So, well, what if crypto is the new internet and we can control that? What if NFTs are the new internet and we can control that? What if, you know, AI is the future and good because that's very convenient because we actually own AI and we can control that, you know? It's like, it's this desperation for control.

• 51:45Ryan Broderick?

  That's exactly it. We are battling against their desperation and it's pathetic and it can definitely make the world suck even more. And to understand exactly how badly it can suck, if they really pull off what they want to pull off, we need to talk about the patient zero weird guy. The guy who is

• 52:04Ryan Broderick?

  the most vocal about making the world a worse place. Do you know anything about Curtis Yarvin?

• 52:09Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 52:10Ryan Broderick?

  So can you give our audience a little primer on Curtis Yarvin?

• 52:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, correct me if I'm wrong. I think he started as a blogger or writer, basically. He's sort of like academia adjacent. Like people think of him as like this smart sort of a knowledge man. And he's a white supremacist bigot fascist, basically. But he's informed a lot of thinking around these Silicon Valley men. Like they read his stuff. They follow his teachings, you know? They really look to him to kind of shape their ideology. And it's interesting. I think Peter Thiel has sort of taken Yarvin and mainstreamed his beliefs in a way that Yarvin couldn't have on his own.

• 52:50Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I think the main, the main sort of tenet, what Yarvin was blogging about under the name Menacious Moldbug was his.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  Moldbug or something, yeah.

• 52:59Ryan Broderick?

  Was, was a return to monarchy. Like, like he really believed that you could create monarchical systems using technology.

• 53:09Ryan Broderick?

  And so like even like, let's say, you know, we don't know if Elon Musk was reading his stuff, but he fits into the blueprint that he created.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. He's read some of that shit. A hundred percent.

• 53:21Ryan Broderick?

  Look, I'm just saying, this podcast is not big enough to have a legal team yet, so we have to say what we do and what we do not know. I cannot prove that Elon Musk has been reading Yarvin. I assume so too. But he fits into the pattern of just like, I am a wealthy man. What if we smash democracy, replace it with tech we own, and then I can control my severe eating disorder and make it everybody else's problem? That's, that seems to be.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  And ultimately, we're kings. We're kings of their, you know, like, all of these work tech, these workers and poor people, they're our serfs. We are the kings. We will rule the world. We will control everything. We will amass endless power and wealth and influence and fuck democracy.

• 54:00Ryan Broderick?

  It was exactly the stuff that I was hearing at Bitcoin Miami, which was like, you could become the king of your like, like Arizona suburb. You could like, you could replace money with Bitcoin and you, and all the public services could run on the blockchain. And you could own them all. And then people would work for you and you could pay them in your own currency. Like, this was like outlined to people in the audience as like a good idea. And I just remember thinking like, what the fuck are you talking about?

• 54:26Speaker 01

  It's insane. It's also just like inherently like this, these visions for the future are built on subjugating other people. There's no equality. There's no like, this could lift us all up. It's like, no, this could lift us up so that we can oppress other people.

• 54:39Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  Like you said, so like, we can like rule our little suburb or whatever. We can amass power and wealth at the expense of others.

• 54:47Ryan Broderick?

  And it's based on like a really existential panic, I think, about like their own mortality, their own relevance. Like, it is classic, I need to buy a boat because I'm 50 years old shit. But like, instead it's like, I'm going to smash the government and replace it with like my AI chatbot.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  Truly. All of these men would be happier if they got a lake house and went out on a boat and threw their phones in the water, honestly, and just shut the fuck up. Like, but, but they're not in it. They're not. And I think also, just the more they march towards death, the more that they can't, you know, they're gonna, I think they're gonna lose their minds even more because they have to grapple with that. Like, I mean, it's just, it's an inevitability. And I think these tech men, I mean, even going back to Steve Jobs, right? Like, they think that they can opt out of death.

• 55:33Ryan Broderick?

  True.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  And they can't.

• 55:35Ryan Broderick?

  I have never been wealthy, so I can't say what that would do to me psychologically. But I have to assume that if I made like $50 billion or whatever, I would just chill. Like, I think I would just, I would probably-

• 55:50Speaker 01

  Undeniably, you couldn't catch me on the internet-

• 55:53Ryan Broderick?

  No.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  For anything.

• 55:54Ryan Broderick?

  No way. No, that's, the internet's a PvP zone for people who don't make enough money. Like, that's, like, I would just be hanging. I'd be chilling, and I would probably die from some sort of like elaborate, like, concoction of drugs and food and alcohol and just like, I'd go nuts. I'd be, I'd be a good time pleasure man. That's what I would be if I, if I had too much money.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah.

• 56:16Ryan Broderick?

  I would not be trying to become an 18-year-old boy. That is a crazy thing to do, in my opinion.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's deranged. But it's, it's, it's because they're very fragile. I mean, you don't get to be a billionaire without some screws loose. Like, you have to be an egomaniac. You have to be fragile in a way. And I, I don't wanna, not all billionaires. I'm sure there's some ones that aren't completely radicalized in the same way, of course, as these men are. But I think the way that these men came up in tech and sort of the the backlash that they've experienced, like, just that they're, they're down the radicalization path, the way that so many people with honestly less money have gone down before. And, yeah, I wish they would log off. But they're, it's the ego. It's the egomaniac.

• 57:00Ryan Broderick?

  It is.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  And misogyny.

• 57:02Ryan Broderick?

  And misogyny.

• 57:02Speaker 01

  And racism.

• 57:03Ryan Broderick?

  And racism. Yeah, it's all of them. Uh, here-

• 57:05Speaker 01

  It's all tied up. And eugenics.

• 57:07Ryan Broderick?

  And eugenics.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  It's all tied.

• 57:08Ryan Broderick?

  Obviously, these guys are goofballs. But they are very powerful, and they're very influential. And, I don't know, from, from where you're sitting, like- What have they actually done to the world? Like, how different are things now because of these guys?

• 57:23Speaker 01

  Significantly different. I think things, I mean, our entire political system has been reoriented in large part due to their influence. The way that they've influenced policies, norms in the tech world, mainstreamed really regressive belief systems. Like, these people are having a very measurable, very detrimental impact on our world. They're doing a lot of harm. I mean, so much of the anti-LGBTQ hate, the misogynistic hate campaigns, like, the anti-D-E-I movement, like, it has been pushed by these figures. So, they have an enormous amount of power and influence.

• 57:59Ryan Broderick?

  I do, I think that's right. And I think that, like, even the prolonged use of their kind of, like, in-shitted platforms is, like, making the world more reactionary, more conservative, less pleasant, and the internet kind of less fun.

• 58:12Speaker 01

  100% agree.

• 58:14Ryan Broderick?

  Here's a simple question for you. Assuming we survive the next four years, how do we stop this from happening again? What lessons should we learn from turning these guys into Lex Luthor?

• 58:22Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, we need to stop the founder worship. This is, like, something I believe so strongly in, and I wrote about in my book. But, like, the reason these men have the power and influence that we do is because they were put on pedestals by the media and by the public. And we don't scrutinize these men enough. And even with the tech lash and everything of, really, since 2016, of people being, hmm, maybe technology's not all good, you know? Like, we still focus on these great men. You know, the story of Tesla or Twitter is told through the lens of Elon Musk, right? And not the workers, not the people that have been fucked over, not the exploited, you know, temps and users, right?

• 59:04Speaker 01

  We tell these stories through these big men. And I think that that's really, really, really harmful and corrosive. I think that entire... Genre of tech journalism needs to go, basically.

• 59:19Ryan Broderick?

  We have to bully these men more. We have to bully them.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  Yes, bullying works.

• 59:23Ryan Broderick?

  Bullying works.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  And you know it works because look at how angry Elon gets when

• 59:26Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  someone makes fun of him.

• 59:27Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's a great note to end on. Bullying works. And for our own sanity, maybe as our only defense during this next regime, we need to make fun of them all the time, you know? And like, let them know that while they may want to control the world, the rest of us will die enjoying pizza and hanging out with our friends and being loved by those around us and not arguing about the free market or solving Sudoku's to buy heroin or whatever.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 59:52Ryan Broderick?

  Taylor, thank you for coming on the show. If people can, if people want to follow you, where can they do that? What's the best place to go?

• 59:58Speaker 01

  Please subscribe to my Substack publication called UserMag, where I write about a lot of this stuff. It's usermag.co. And I'm also on YouTube and you can listen to my podcast, Power User, on all platforms.

• 1:00:11Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, you got a .co URL? That's sick.

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, really? I wanted the .com, but it was going to be $900 and I wanted to spend $12.

• 1:00:19Ryan Broderick?

  I couldn't get garbage day.com because it's owned by a waste removal app.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  What do you have?

• 1:00:25Ryan Broderick?

  I have garbage day.e-mail.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  Oh, that's funny. That's good.

• 1:00:30Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, just so.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  I should have done that.

• 1:00:31Ryan Broderick?

  So people don't forget that it's an email.

• 1:00:34Ryan Broderick?

  Well, thank you very much for coming on. This is fantastic. And I look forward to bumping into you at the Boy Blood Bank next time I go in for a transfusion.

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  I'll see you in there.

• 1:00:45Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World is a Garbage Day production. It's written and produced by Grant Irving, hosted by myself, with research from the always fantastic Adam Bumis. A huge thanks to Gabby Cash for designing the incredibly deranged art for this show. And a huge thank you to Kat Rijesk, our lovely video editor. And if you'd like to sponsor an episode, you can reach out to Multitude, our wonderful partners, multitude-productions ads. We have a Patreon, which you can find at patreon.com/panicworld. And I'd like to end this episode with an important reminder. Log off and touch grass while you still can.