00:00:18.240And we are going to tell you how to become this level of unpleasant, unsettling, and very disturbing to all of your friends and loved ones.
00:00:27.620And if that's not exciting enough, we're going to enable you to find a downline, if you will, of other people that you can then teach that to in a sort of triangle.
00:00:38.560There's got to be a better word for this, but I'll figure it out later.
00:00:41.900Anyway, so today we're going to start our own In Bed with the Right Pyramid scheme, and you're all coming with us.
00:00:48.300You're getting in on the ground floor, folks. Congratulations.
00:00:50.380Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb, and whether I like it or not, I am in bed with the right, sort of by myself right now, I'm just recording this without Moira.
00:01:03.460I just wanted to briefly welcome you to this episode and contextualize it a little bit.
00:01:08.320This was our live show that we did in San Francisco at Swedish American Hall on August 27th of this year.
00:01:13.960It is also kind of a keystone in the big bridge that we're building here on Embed with the Right.
00:01:21.880Namely, we're finally filling in our theory of the tech creep, the Silicon Valley creep.
00:01:28.220That was the title, How to Become a Silicon Valley Creep in 10 Easy Steps.
00:01:32.48010 steps is a lot of steps, and this ended up being quite a long show, meaning we're going to split this one into two parts.
00:01:39.740The other thing I wanted to mention here is that the reason why we're doing this now
00:01:42.920is that my book, What Tech Calls Governing, just came out,
00:01:46.740and we are very much drawing on my research and my analysis in that book
00:01:50.960in this particular episode and in our thinking about the creep more generally.
00:01:55.400So if, for some reason, you retain a certain appetite for learning more about creep masculinity
00:02:02.340and the tech right after listening to however many hours this episode ends up being,
00:02:08.420feel free to check out and buy my book,
00:02:10.800Wherever Good Books Are Sold, What Tech Calls Governing.
00:02:13.260Anyway, here now without further ado is our live show,
00:02:17.800How to Become a Silicon Valley Creep in 10 Easy Steps.
00:02:58.720but there is a specter haunting the Bay Area.
00:03:02.420and it is a specter of creepiness creepiness this is kind of a hard category to articulate
00:03:12.960because like what is creepy it's an affect maybe like an emotional posture or a political posture
00:03:21.580or like a vibe but do you ever like find yourself talking to somebody around here
00:03:27.960it's normal it's a regular conversation with a plausibly human character
00:03:34.000and then you'll realize that this like very bay area person like zippered vests little
00:03:41.380like hokas like everything is like currently high on ketamine like as they're talking to you
00:03:46.140you kind of get the sense that there's a human form there but the person you're actually talking1.00
00:03:53.920to the thing you're actually talking to has like traded a little bit of their humanity for something
00:03:58.880like weirder and like lesser you can tell that mora just moved to san francisco okay okay uh
00:04:06.300how is any of this remarkable well today we're going to try and talk about like those characters
00:04:12.680a character we have started referring to as the creep the silicon valley creep yeah so this is a
00:04:20.100very fun category. And it's one that I think has become more interesting for a podcast about
00:04:26.040right-wing masculinity in the last couple of years, right? The idea that certain tech
00:04:31.660billionaires are socially maladroit and like not super good at relating to other human beings
00:04:37.940is an old one, right? The idea that Mark Zuckerberg is maybe not a people person
00:04:42.980had sort of percolated, I would say. But it was, I think, still back then understood as something
00:04:49.860kind of apolitical right it was just like it's just a nerd that's that's all that is it doesn't
00:04:54.740say anything about a political posture and it's not necessarily a gendered performance either
00:04:58.520and i think that the last couple of years have really been an education uh in that in the fact
00:05:05.140that like no this this particular kind of creepiness does come with its own politics and
00:05:10.880its right-wing politics and it comes with its own gender and the gender is in this case pretty male
00:05:17.840So, you know, I'm just just saying, no offense, gentlemen, both of you who are here tonight.
00:05:29.780But, you know, like when we started our podcast, which is this point was a while ago, it was all the way back in 2023.
00:05:34.940But like we decided to sort of like break down the types of right wing masculinity that we are seeing into like three major categories that we would hope would like help conceptualize it for us.
00:05:49.480And that's how we came up with our taxonomy, our like categorization system for right wing types of guys.
00:05:58.560We've got the perverts, the preachers and the creeps.
00:06:03.220Yeah, the idea is sort of that they each embody a specific kind of masculinist politics and that they sort of work through specific institutions as well, right?
00:06:14.400Like we'll talk about them in a little bit more detail in a second, but it's important to note that it's not just like an individual guy, but it's usually taking recourse at specific institutions and that they wax and wane in the right-wing ecosystem.
00:06:28.700There's a moment we would contend where right-wing masculinity
00:06:32.920sort of was identified with the preacher.0.95
00:06:36.760Then there's a moment where sort of the pervert gets in there,0.85
00:14:15.080But like, I think this has like a degree of explanatory power for something that's distinct about the creep because preachers have whole communities of like, you know, churchgoers and like religious sects around them.
00:14:28.240And perverts have, you know, like frat boys or like islands or, you know, whole planes full of people who are into what they're into.
00:20:10.680Now, like with any good pyramid scheme, of course, we do have a product that I want to
00:20:18.640recommend to you, which is a book I wrote.
00:20:20.720If you guys want to, which has a lot of stuff about creeps.
00:20:25.540And it's honestly not that useful if you're trying to become one.
00:20:29.160It's kind of more of a, it's a hateration.
00:20:31.940It's a holleration in this dancery, you know.
00:20:35.040But it's not, today is really, this is a particular seminar where you can really learn the lessons that I have absorbed over years of hate watching these people.
00:20:47.520and then I want to share it with you, you know.
00:20:51.140But yeah, anyway, let's say you want to start creeping.
00:25:18.520You're like basically using the alumni Rolodex, in this case for light fraud, but in other cases just for, you know, fraud adjacent activity while sort of being like, well, I don't need college anymore, except for the alumni directory, I suppose.
00:25:33.460Yeah, it's got that like simultaneity of superiority and desperation, right?
00:25:37.700It's like, I'm better than you, but please, please, please approve of me.
00:25:40.760Like, I'm a renegade, but I need all this institutional backing.
00:25:45.240It's got a contradiction built right in.
00:25:48.520Yeah, Silicon Valley is obviously like a particularly fertile ground, I think, for this kind of thinking.
00:25:53.580So many Silicon Valley startups sort of emphasize their non-vertical power structures,
00:25:59.760the fact that they were not traditional companies, that, you know, really they were a family that was on a mission.
00:26:06.800Apparently some families are on missions.
00:26:09.620I think my family's on the mission of getting through Christmas dinner without anyone making it weird.
00:26:15.400Yeah, my family's on the mission of psychologically terrorizing one another.
00:26:22.100But that sort of made it much easier, I think, to kind of create this veneer of like, well, we're breaking with the way companies normally work, the way companies are normally founded, the way power is normally distributed in our society.
00:26:35.960When in fact, of course, it then turned out once the CEO was in any way challenged, it's like, well, no, point of order.
00:26:42.620We're still a totally normal company and you're fired.
00:26:45.400and this is a kind of mythos that i think primarily served to convince an audience of like
00:26:53.460basically the tech executives themselves right who really wanted to both be oh i'm just a regular guy
00:26:59.760i'm one of the people i wear a hoodie to work and also like so powerful that they can fire
00:27:04.580like literally tens of thousands of people at will so maybe this is a good time to turn to
00:29:57.100it's not that nerd culture itself is sort of in league with creepiness it's that a very specific
00:30:05.640kind of nerd culture i think is required if you want to be a good and effective creep yeah i will
00:30:10.940say that like the politics of the nerd have changed dramatically since my youth like redacted
00:30:17.220years ago because like it used to be yeah that the nerds were like the lovable underdogs right
00:30:23.960They were sort of exiled because they had integrity and they had intelligence and they were like sort of persisting with like good values in the face of like hegemonic bad ones.0.86
00:30:34.780And now when somebody tells me they are a nerd, I'm like, oh, so you're like a rich Nazi.
00:30:39.360Like it's like a little, the vibe has shifted.
00:30:43.100Well, I'll defend nerds and say not all nerds.
00:30:45.780I think what's happened is nerd culture always had a sense of what it is like to be dispossessed, to be marginal, to be set upon, to be kind of the underdog, which I think has made it attractive to a lot of people who found themselves on the margins and who found themselves, you know, not sort of at the beating heart of, let's say, the high school experience, where I think where most people sort of come to realize like, oh, I might be a nerd.
00:31:13.020But at the same time, of course, inherent in that can be,
00:31:16.660it doesn't have to be, but can be a sense of what it would be like
00:31:20.820to actually have the power that you deserve,
00:31:23.680to be demarginalized, to suddenly be at the center0.72
00:31:26.580that you feel where you belong, right?
00:31:29.160So there is this kind of loserdom that you can identify with,
00:31:32.700but of course it can also be kind of a form of wounded masculinity
00:31:36.200that is keenly aware of something that's been taken from it
00:31:38.800and something that is being withheld from it
00:31:42.180And that something can, you know, as in, for instance, the Revenge of the Nerds movies from the 1980s, be just sex with other people who may be or may not be unconscious.
00:31:54.300And they do not rewatch those movies, seriously.
00:32:57.140That's where you want to be if you really want to creep it up, it seems to me, right?
00:33:02.040So if you want to be a Silicon Valley creep, you're going to want to make sure that you're a sci-fi fan, but also that you're like that kind of sci-fi fan, right?
00:33:11.200Yeah, you're going to be the kind who has a lot of opinions about like a black actor being cast as a stormtrooper and like a third rate, like sequel.0.77
00:33:18.700You're going to have this sense of ownership, dominance,
00:33:23.100and purity over the source material in this way