You can check out our guest Gil Durán’s new book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, when it comes out on August 18. But before that you can listen to our conversation with him about the biggest points from the book and from his research on Silicon Valley culture and the seemingly limitless power of our tech overlords. With Gil, we have the opportunity to learn about the twisted ideology our tech rulers have embraced and the deeply anti-human plans they are putting into action via influence in both parties.

Elon Musk has big plans for us! Circling around trillionaire status, our tech tyrant has long pitched ideas to “bring our society into the future” — his idea of a future he can design and control. While, thank goodness, we’re not in a timeline with Hyperloops, SpaceX is Musk’s endeavor to expand humanity into other parts of the solar system. Colonizing Mars has always been a pet project for him. But Musk doesn’t think of these efforts as big intellectual, cultural, and social steps for humanity, especially in an age in which that kind of technology could ultimately be a last resort from the planet that billionaires have destroyed. Rather, his view, and the views of other capitalists who see themselves as jumping off a sinking ship, is that it’s all going to be a pay-to-play system: only the wealthy and elite will have their passport to the galaxy. Thinking about the collective hope, inspiration, and excitement that past space programs have afforded humanity for decades, there’s something profoundly sad and cruel about how Musk has chosen to wield his vast riches and hoard their benefits for himself.

On to even brighter subjects, we talk about the anti-humanism of Peter Thiel and how it’s flown under the radar in mainstream media even as it seems more necessary and crucial than ever to call out the contempt billionaires feel toward other human beings — that the richest people in our society actually have no problem with, and may root for, the extinction of everyone but the hyper-wealthy. We connect this line of far-right anti-humanist ideology to one of its major progenitors, Curtis Yarvin, who we consider the “godfather” of that project, someone from whom Thiel, Musk, and other tech billionaires have taken their cues. It’s a larger picture of what we think of as a single phenomenon — Elon Musk regularly using his political and financial power toward the erosion of human life. So we take an unsparing look at the source of these ideologies and address how they’ve infiltrated our society and changed our lives.

Thanks for watching! This episode of KK&F will be available to everyone tomorrow on major streaming platforms, including Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.