00:00:30.920I read some reporting in the New York Times last week that said Elon Musk is straight up just like walking up to people at parties and offering to inseminate them.
00:00:38.860He is also doing that to Taylor Swift and seemingly every woman who works for him.
00:00:45.100Oddly enough, Mrs. Swift has not taken him up on it.
00:00:49.120The Russian founder of Telegram claims to have fathered 100 children.0.99
00:00:53.940There is all kinds of weird gender, sex, reproduction, marriage, eugenics-y shit coming out of these guys. And they are all just true freaks. And I didn't really understand what was going on with that or why, you know, on a superficial level, quite liberal cultural positionings had yielded these really reactionary gender politics, especially around sex and gender issues.1.00
00:01:22.120And that leads us to our guest today, who is actually the expert in how these freaks became such freaks, who's going to walk us through the story of how it happened.
00:01:33.340Welcome, Becca Lewis, to the podcast. Thank you so much for being on Bid with the Right.
00:01:38.560Yeah, so we're really excited. And we should preface this by saying, we're tackling a big
00:01:44.920question here, but we're going to tackle it using a guy that I'm guessing compared to most of the
00:01:49.840people we discuss on the pod, most of our listeners will not have heard of. So do you want to introduce
00:01:55.980our freak of the week, basically? Who are we talking about here today?
00:02:00.640The hero who made all of Silicon Valley go wildly red-pilled.
00:02:05.260Yes, that's right. So I've spent the better part of the past few years researching the history of right-wing influence in Silicon Valley, and particularly in the 80s and 90s, kind of in the first, you know, Web 1.0 era.
00:02:22.200and the guy that really brought right-wing politics to the valley in the way that we know it today is
00:02:29.460a man named George Gilder and as you said I think most people probably haven't heard of him today
00:02:35.040but if you look at coverage of Silicon Valley in the 1990s he was everywhere he was one of
00:02:43.000the primary evangelists of Silicon Valley kind of as mythology as key to the American future
00:02:52.100And so he really has faded from our memory, but he was a crucial guy.
00:03:09.820And you start that dissertation by pointing out that in some way there is this kind of
00:03:14.720media narrative that tech is now turning to the right.
00:03:19.260We keep being surprised by this. And I'm wondering if you could maybe before we get into Mr. Gilder himself, you can give us a sense of why you think that is. Why do we keep being surprised by the fact that a fairly male dominated bunch of rich dudes might eventually develop, you know, slightly reactionary politics?
00:03:42.620I mean, have you met, you know, older rich dudes? Like, why are we, why culturally are we sort of primed to be like, oh, really? Reactionary in Silicon Valley? Why? I never.
00:03:53.060No, that's exactly right. That I did like a little mini analysis of media coverage of Silicon Valley. And it seems like every four years, each presidential election, news media writ large rediscovers that there are reactionary politics within Silicon Valley. And it is treated as a new thing.
00:04:14.160So we've had it this summer, people discovering kind of Elon Musk and J.D. Vance.
00:04:20.240But if you go back, you know, in 2016, it was a big deal when...
00:04:27.240Palmer Luckey was a big Trump supporter back then.
00:04:30.860Larry Ellison has been a big Trump supporter, the CEO of Oracle.
00:04:35.380And as I kept going further and further back in time, I kept finding that this was a longtime phenomenon.
00:04:41.340And in fact, all the way back into the 1990s, people were kind of warning of techno-fascism, as one writer called it. So why that might be the case, I have a couple of theories. One is that we know one side of the history really well.
00:04:58.800And, you know, our colleague Fred Turner at Stanford has written kind of the definitive work on this history. And it's a history of libertarianism that emerged actually out of the counterculture in the 1960s and how that has really influenced Silicon Valley.
00:05:15.100And that has been a very important force. But I think it leads a lot of people to assume that that is the only force that has been kind of guiding, you know, this Californian ideology, although that was not Fred Turner.
00:05:29.120But this idea that there's kind of a countercultural hipness matched with a wish to not have government intervene.
00:05:35.280And then I think more generally, there's a tendency to assume, and this is something I know you've challenged a bit as well, Adrienne, a tendency to assume that technology is somehow inherently progressive.
00:05:49.020Yeah. So I think that people are really resistant to this idea that people can and do embrace the most cutting edge technology for the purposes of restoring older social systems.
00:06:29.080in the hothouse cruises of many male homosexuals short-term intense violent abandoned to the rule0.94
00:06:35.640and worship of the most worthy phallus moving from body to body to hungry body with scarcely0.99
00:06:40.720a glint of human recognition beyond the beckoning flesh repeatedly coupling and climaxing all
00:06:46.140beneath clinging beating and lubricating blanket of anonymous steam pulsing in the rhythm of the
00:06:51.860hunt and the chase with no fear of procreation or entanglement and usually no expense these men
00:06:56.740can enact for free the ultimate male fantasies of hedonistic and ecstatic sex so not a libertarian
00:07:03.540i would say like this is this is the most christian right coded like insanity of like someone like
00:07:10.680imagining a bathhouse who i think has not been to a bathhouse do you think it was hard for him to
00:07:16.340type that with one hand yeah i was like i was wondering about that i was like it's it does
00:07:21.840have that sort of telltale conservative thing where it's like, that's a lot of detail, man.
00:07:26.960Yeah, I had not. It's like, yeah, the hot oil rub down. Okay, so if you say so, man.
00:07:34.100I think we might be getting ahead of ourselves because we're deep in George Gilder's psychology
00:07:38.020already. But I think maybe our listeners don't quite know who he is.
00:07:41.680But I mean, I guess the point, the only point I was trying to make is that we really are
00:07:45.940looking not at a pipeline from, as you say, the California ideology to sort of more reactionary
00:07:52.100politics. We're really looking at someone who's going from backlash, social conservatism to being
00:07:59.500like, yay, the internet. You know, it's very, very weird. That's exactly right. He, well,
00:08:05.460actually, he started out his career as a moderate Republican who felt that people like Barry
00:08:11.400Goldwater had taken Republicans way too far to the right. And his first book, which he co-authored
00:08:17.420with his friend, was called The Party That Lost Its Head. And he was really criticizing conservatism.
00:08:23.480But then he actually ended up meeting William F. Buckley, kind of godfather of social conservatism,
00:08:30.680and became a mentee of William F. Buckley's, and then became part of the conservative movement
00:08:38.120that he had really critiqued. And starting in the 1970s, he decided he wanted to become
00:08:44.880America's number one anti-feminist. And gender politics really were at the heart of his entire
00:08:52.340worldview. And he wrote that the differences between the sexes are kind of the single most
00:08:57.060important thing in the structure of society. He wrote a couple of books that were these
00:09:03.360like deeply deeply pessimistic laments uh you know sexual suicide was the name of the first book
00:09:12.500sexual suicide is where i know george gilder from as a student of anti-feminist backlash i
00:09:18.520had a conversation with friend of the pod jeet here of the nation who in his very adorable
00:09:25.740canadian accent was like you have to read sexual suicide and it is a trip man it really is it is a
00:09:34.720weird weird book yeah and i think because it's so weird it's really easy to purely pathologize it
00:09:42.940yeah he has even said like i was in a weird place when i wrote this could you tell our listeners a
00:09:49.320little bit about this like wild anti-feminist crazy book, Sexual Suicide? Because that was his
00:09:55.580first political book, you said? Well, so his first political book was the one claiming Republicans
00:09:59.700had gone too far. This was his first sort of like anti-feminist awakening book. Yes, exactly,
00:10:05.580exactly. And it was published in 1973. And basically his argument in this book was
00:10:11.100human progress is procreation. And so procreation is the most progressive thing
00:10:17.460that humanity can do. And we need to be centering our society around kind of the nuclear family
00:10:24.820structure that can facilitate procreation. And his argument is, you know, essentially that women0.97
00:10:32.480need to be first and foremost, stay at home mothers and don't belong in the workforce.0.58
00:10:36.580And his argument for that is that women's sexuality kind of through menstruation and1.00
00:10:44.300childbirth and breastfeeding that it takes place over this like much longer time scale
00:10:50.680than men's sexuality which he says really only takes place over the course of kind of build up
00:10:57.520and ejaculation and so he says that the the process of civilizing society is the process of
00:11:04.520kind of taming male sexuality to extend into this longer time scale horizon so that they can kind of
00:11:11.740like appreciate looking to the future and what it means to be a father and, you know, extend
00:11:19.060humanity. And so basically he says, well, women already have this natural orientation to the0.94
00:11:24.240future through their biological processes, which are long scale, but men have to go to work,
00:11:32.020compete in this kind of marketplace to prepare them for this role of fatherhood. So it's this
00:11:38.400kind of convoluted way of saying men belong in the workforce women belong at home yes it's a
00:11:43.660kind of sexual long-termism isn't it um we might sort of point out to our listeners that that
00:11:49.560gilder is clearly drawing on a couple of things there there is clearly a kind of reaction to the
00:11:54.480sexual revolution there right clearly not little anxiety about the invention of the pill
00:11:59.760And there is a kind of Moynihan Report-style fixation on especially black men's sexuality.
00:12:09.320And I think when he's thinking of sort of this short-term male sexuality, very, very frequently he has non-white people in mind.
00:12:16.540So he really, it's a greatest hits of sort of like post-LBJ kind of conservative stalking horses.
00:12:24.480And it's no shocker that Bill Buckley would be like, hey, do you want to come on Firing Line?
00:12:28.300And that's right. He, you know, the name of the book, Sexual Suicide, he basically claims that, you know, feminists and gay people are leading humanity to kind of commit suicide as a species because they are making it so humans are no longer prioritizing procreation.0.77
00:12:48.260And as you say, Adrian, he is putting a lot of blame as well on the welfare state. He says that welfare is causing black poverty because, as he puts it, it turns men into cuckolds of the state because black women could be supported as single mothers through welfare programs without kind of a male breadwinner in the house.0.93
00:13:50.240He loves to brag that he got named the, you know, National Organization of Women's Male Chauvinist Pig of the Year.
00:13:59.040And that, dear listeners, is while Norman Mailer was still alive.
00:14:03.400I think he says that Norman Mailer was the year before.
00:14:06.480I have yet to actually confirm this with now.
00:14:08.800But I think he tried to position himself directly next to Norman Mailer.
00:14:15.940But then the funny thing is, you know, he became this kind, you know, I refer to him as kind of a Forrest Gump figure in conservative politics because he shows up in all of these different places.
00:14:25.880And what happened was, you know, in the 1970s, after this book got published, he got married, he started going to church more, and he kind of took all of his pessimistic ideas about gender and humanity and retained all of the misogyny, but flipped it on its head and made it a really optimistic vision.
00:14:47.880And he said, oh, what is actually going to save us is the restoration of the male breadwinner role through entrepreneurship. And he became a really big proponent of supply side economics. And his next big book, he had a couple in between, but his next big book was called Wealth and Poverty.
00:15:07.160And it was essentially a supply side economics book that still drew on all of these gendered ideas to justify kind of cutting taxes on the wealthy and cutting the welfare state. And it became, it was referred to as the Bible of the Reagan administration in the first term, because a couple of Reagan administration members kind of bought copies for everyone and it was on everyone's desks.
00:15:31.740So when we think about Reagan and austerity and, you know, welfare and supply side economics and all of that, Gilder was actually a big voice, you know, one of several, but a big voice influencing that.
00:15:45.520So actually, they gave a copy to everybody in the Reagan administration. That is wild.
00:15:51.160Yeah, at least I believe it was in the Office of Management and Budget. The quote was that you would see a copy on everyone's desk.
00:15:57.360So it was pretty pervasive. And, you know, Reagan took it up quite a bit. This is partly because Gilder's cousin ended up being a speechwriter for Reagan and would take a lot of George Gilder's ideas and rhetoric and kind of put them directly into Reagan's speeches.
00:16:14.560So you have a lot of Reagan throughout the 1980s talking about entrepreneurship in these kind of mythological, heroic terms.
00:16:25.860And now entrepreneurship, of course, like we have the ideal of the entrepreneur is everywhere.
00:16:31.460But this was kind of the first moment.
00:16:34.040You know, it was always a bit of a mythology, but I would say there was a real resurgence and expansion of it in the 80s in no small part because Reagan talked about it a lot.
00:16:44.040And he, you know, Reagan said, if I didn't know any better, I'd say that entrepreneur is another word for America.
00:16:50.300And Gilder was one of the big inspirations behind that.
00:16:54.280And it's not surprising that that would eventually find its way or that he would find its way to the tech industry, which really did sort of start in the 1980s, really becoming kind of almost a proving ground, right?
00:17:06.800It became the place where you could sort of tell these just so stories.
00:17:11.320And in most of the country, it ended up being, you know, these, these fables of neoliberalization were largely connected to massive job loss and like, you know, loss of status, et cetera, et cetera. Well, in Silicon Valley, it could actually look creative and fun and, and exciting and overall very pippy and positive. Whereas largely everyone else is like, I got some bad news. We can't save the plant. You're all, you're all going home unemployed, right?
00:17:36.660Silicon Valley is the place where the entrepreneur would show up and you wouldn't sort of run for the doors, but where he showed up and it's like, you're all getting free burritos, you know, not quite then yet, but like, that is the, yeah.
00:17:48.340Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, Gilder says that he, he discovered Silicon Valley through his research on entrepreneurship. So it was through this kind of ideal of the entrepreneur as a male breadwinner, kind of heroic male savior figure.
00:18:05.840He was writing a book called The Spirit of Enterprise, was researching a bunch of different cases of entrepreneurship and ended up getting really involved in writing about Silicon Valley and particularly the microchip industry.
00:18:19.820And I think for people who are not directly within Silicon Valley, obviously kind of the biggest names emerging out of Silicon Valley in the 80s were Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
00:18:31.460But just before that, there was a generation that was really the generation that Gilder got inspired by.
00:18:38.600And these were the guys who developed and sold the microchip.
00:18:42.780And it was a group of eight men who left a semiconductor company.
00:18:49.140The Trader is Eight. And they created their own, you know, startup and eventually developed the microchip and started selling it. And it was two of them that split off and founded Intel. And not for nothing, there is this really well-known within Silicon Valley, quote unquote, family tree of different startups that emerged from the Fairchild semiconductor Trader is Eight.
00:19:16.020People call them the fair children, all of these startups that emerged from this.
00:19:20.840So there really is this kind of patrilineal thing that Gilder was latching onto.
00:19:30.260On the one hand, this is a guy who is so interested in, as you say, sort of the long-termist view as opposed to sort of male impulse.
00:19:39.720It's funny because, of course, the fair children, there's a ton of Oedipal energy in it too, right?0.99
00:19:44.460Like they all split off from Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, partly because Shockley is just kind of an asshole, right?0.94
00:19:51.500He has this like very East Coast, very kind of strict management style.
00:19:56.260And these people are young West Coast socialized engineers who don't really truck with that, which is so interesting that Gilder can read that as like a tale of sort of like orderly intergenerational transmission.
00:20:10.760when in fact what it is is just like a series of pretty rough betrayals, right?
00:20:15.860I mean, like, I guess the fact that everyone, independent of, like, betrayal or fealty,
00:20:21.420just gets fucking filthy rich helps, but no one's being super nice to each other, right?
00:20:27.580Well, famously, nobody's that nice to each other in actual families either.0.96
00:20:30.560I mean, like, it's interesting to me that, like, any hierarchy of power in Gilder's imagination
00:20:35.500is metaphorized as a family relation, right?
00:20:38.020Like anything where there's any impulse is a patrilineal impulse, you know, any relation is the relation between a father and son.
00:20:47.800You know, there's one way that you could metaphorize the entrepreneur.
00:20:50.180One way that like a lot of listeners might be more familiar with is to analogize the entrepreneur to like the quote unquote pioneer, right?
00:20:58.340And it's interesting to me that in Gilder's imagination, it's rather it's a family analogy.
00:21:03.380He's a daddy who's bringing home something for you.
00:21:06.460And I'm glad you bring up the pioneer thing because I do think that that was appealing to him to a degree because, you know, it meant that Silicon Valley already came with all of these mythologies, right? It had the mythology of California. It was already bucking kind of the East Coast establishment. It came with this pioneer mythos.
00:21:25.740But you would see him and some of his research assistants throughout the 90s kind of experimenting with homestead metaphors because they would try to kind of bring the like pilgrim family metaphor into the pioneer in the West metaphor.
00:21:41.780So they would try to bring that father role back. And I think you do see this push pull of, you know, he started out as this provocateur figure, kind of a troll. And then he remade himself as this kind of like wise guru. But you still often had this underlying troll energy that was kind of looking to piss people off.
00:22:02.940And I think you see that impulse going back and forth throughout his career and throughout the men that he's writing about's careers. And it goes hand in hand with this impulse to like constantly have this family unit at the center of it while also kind of leaving women behind.
00:22:21.240I mean, yeah, he's excited about the microchip because he says it kind of will allow people to leave behind the like world of messy material realities.
00:22:32.060And he says that men will be able to essentially kind of leave behind their bodily sexual impulses as they enter into this space of like the pure information mind realm.
00:22:44.600And so there's the real fantasy of escape.
00:22:46.620Yeah. I mean, famously, the Internet has nothing to do with sexual release.
00:22:49.960So, you know, we're, I guess the point goes to George Gilder there.
00:22:54.520It's the great divide between like masculine, cold reason and feminine, messy liabilities of nature, right?
00:23:04.240It's also interesting to me that you say he kind of stays a troll, right?
00:23:08.400and that strikes me as very well suited to the ethos of silicon valley which has this
00:23:14.240self-mythologizing like impish defiant uh dare i even say disruptive um model right but it's also
00:23:24.680like he can't decide which side of the oedipal conflict he wants to be on like is he is the
00:23:29.980guru daddy or is he the defiant son that's exactly right he wants to be both that's exactly right and
00:23:36.540And I feel like you continue to see that time and time again with kind of big name Silicon
00:25:22.060So by the late 1980s, he had fully put his attention on microchips.
00:25:27.780He published a book called Microcosm. And then he became really enamored with the idea of networked
00:25:34.800computers as a new communication system. And at this point, the internet was out there, but it
00:25:40.760wasn't used in a widespread way yet. And the web was just being invented. But he really identified
00:25:49.460that the internet could be a really powerful communication tool for conservatives. And he
00:25:57.500He specifically saw networked computers as a way of attacking these kind of secularizing feminist or feminized forces in society, especially mainstream media and public schools, and of restoring the nuclear family and the home as a site of productivity and society.
00:26:18.500And so, you know, a couple of things that he identified, for example, was, you know, there was already the growing Christian homeschool movement that was pulling kids out of public schools or, you know, schools altogether because they weren't sufficiently religious.
00:26:34.800Gilder said networked computers are going to make it possible for the Christian homeschool movement to absolutely explode.
00:26:42.860and that means that again mothers can stay at home with their children be their teachers and
00:26:50.720their stay-at-home mothers right he also alluded sometimes to the fact that if men could work from
00:26:56.400home that it would also continue to keep the father role incredibly present so he was very
00:27:02.160focused on the way that like physically computers and networked computers would allow kind of this
00:27:08.100re-centering of the home as a site in society.
00:27:13.360And we should say maybe for our younger listeners who have always had computers in their pockets,
00:27:18.840that there was this institution of the family computer for really the first 10 years of the
00:27:25.580internet where you had one computer connected to the internet and you took turns.
00:27:30.040It made a screaming sound when you tried to get on the internet, which should have been a warning.
00:27:34.320Exactly. You kept getting AOL disks that promised you oddly specific number of hours, like 1,072 hours of free internet. And you're like, okay. But the idea that that could function as a hearth around which the family unit constitutes itself is not as crazy as it might sound to someone who thinks of the internet mostly of like four people looking at four screens while eating dinner, right?
00:28:02.580Like they're still very much working in a paradigm where the home kind of gets centered around a shared computing space.
00:28:30.120And Gilder was a really big advocate for networked computers and eventually the World Wide Web because he said, no, computers are interactive.
00:28:41.920They force people to kind of become these more active agents rather than passive absorbers of information.
00:28:49.540You can kind of go and be entrepreneurial on a computer.
00:28:53.180And so he kind of folded that into his idea and mythology of entrepreneurship.
00:28:58.700And of course, it allows you to do your own research, I guess, is how we would put it today, right? So there is an element, right? Part of his dislike of cold media, basically, of media that you're in a more receptive mode towards is that they're all dominated by liberals, right?
00:29:15.040People like Gilder, I know, did push Republicans onto the Internet quite early because it was felt to be a space that was more congenial to their message than perhaps what we today would call legacy media.
00:29:30.240them. That's exactly right. You know, he may not have been prescient about porn on computers,
00:29:37.020but he was very prescient about the ability of the internet to kind of provide opportunities
00:29:43.560for people that hadn't necessarily had widespread audiences to gain audiences. He knew, he said,
00:29:49.800we will be able to use the internet as conservatives to attack our enemies in the
00:29:56.140media to an extent that we've never been able to before. So he understood that as early as like
00:30:01.4201990, 1991. He was really, really an early adopter. Just to clarify a little like the
00:30:07.580character of Gilder's thinking, because now I think Republican or right wing critiques of the
00:30:13.520liberal media have implied or quite explicitly like a populist message, right? Like you guys
00:30:18.680are the elites and that's why you're out of touch and that's why you're liberal. Was that contained
00:30:22.640in his thought? Was it like a Vox Populi kind of a thing? Or was he more of like, I am the elite
00:30:28.300who is going to instruct the people in the correct way to live via these new technologies?
00:30:34.800It was a little bit of both. So what he would say was that he was opposed to hierarchy when it was
00:30:39.980imposed from the top down. And so he opposed kind of the big federal government. He opposed
00:30:46.440mass broadcast media with kind of the three big networks but once you tear down those overarching
00:30:53.580you know unjust systems then the natural hierarchies of the universe naturally emerge
00:31:00.700and those are the startup founders those are the entrepreneurs those are the new media figures
00:31:07.060and that was the hierarchy that he believed was justified and and beautiful the natural
00:31:13.460appropriate, dare I even say, perhaps divinely ordained hierarchy that always has those guys at
00:31:19.840the top somehow. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. I'm glad you bring that up,
00:31:25.520actually, because he did. He spoke of computers in explicitly Christian religious terms.
00:31:33.260He was so taken with the microchip because he believed that, you know, the microchip,
00:31:37.820what it does is that it takes all of this computing power that used to be on these
00:31:42.220massive mainframe computers that took up, you know, entire buildings. And it shrinks it down
00:31:47.840so that you can have the same amount of power running on a small personal computer. And so
00:31:53.040what he said is the microchip overcomes the limits of time and space. And in that way,
00:32:00.920kind of brings men closer to their creator, and kind of allows men to enter into this quasi
00:32:07.860spiritual world of information. And that's when, you know, when he talks about leaving behind the
00:32:13.920material world of kind of women's bodies and poverty and all of these things, it's a very0.81
00:32:20.940Christian message that he's delivering. And we should say that among the heterodox0.96
00:32:25.220ideas that he champions on the internet early on is intelligent design. So it's really quite
00:32:31.900explicit. He was a founder of the Discovery Institute, I believe, right? Yeah, that's right.
00:32:37.180The Discovery Institute, which went on to be kind of the leading think tank trying to get intelligent design into public schools.
00:32:46.340And in fact, they were not the first or only, but some of the biggest proponents of intelligent design writ large as this new form of creationism.
00:32:55.540And I remember very online, very like when I first went on the Internet, like they were there.
00:33:00.540Like the creationists were like surprisingly good at digital.
00:38:16.080What about Gilder's influence on Silicon Valley, right?
00:38:19.880Like who were the people who are reading his books and meeting with him and being like, yes, this is how I want to build my company or yes, this reflects my worldview, right?
00:38:32.680Yeah, there were a few different groups that became real acolytes of Gilder.
00:38:37.220And in fact, there's a really great memoir from, I think it was published in the year 2000 called Cyber Selfish by a former Wired magazine writer named Paulina Borsuk.
00:38:49.880And she refers to a group that she calls a group of guilders because she says that it was a whole group of guys that kind of followed him around and took his word as gold and went to events that, you know, there were all sorts of conferences that he would be speaking at and they would follow along and talk to him.
00:39:09.360And at this point, mostly when he would speak to Silicon Valley, he was mostly speaking about new technologies he was excited about.
00:39:18.940He was mostly being a techno evangelist. He wasn't giving his men in marriage spiel to these guys. But he was also simultaneously still publishing in National Review where he would say that, you know, women were fundamentally unsuited to be entrepreneurs, things like that.
00:39:38.040And of course, if you actually look into what he's saying in Silicon Valley, it still very much is built off of this like masculine mythology of capitalism and entrepreneurship. So you had the Gilders and then you have kind of an emerging Silicon Valley press at the time that both featured him and also promoted a lot of his ideas.
00:40:01.960And so, for example, he was on the cover of Wired magazine when that was like the big thing in 1996. And in fact, the head of Forbes magazine for a while started a kind of quarterly version of Forbes magazine that was basically an outlet for Gilder to publish long form ideas about technology.
00:40:21.200And so he kind of ended up having this massive pulpit to share his ideas.
00:40:27.140And what he started to do, and this is what Adriana alluded to before, is he started to promote certain technologies over others based on which he felt kind of aligned with, he called it his paradigm, but essentially it was his ideological vision.
00:40:43.980And in addition to all of this, he started his own newsletter, and it essentially became an investment newsletter. But he always claimed, like, I'm not making a case for what you should invest in. I'm making this case that was almost kind of this Christian predeterminist case of, like, these are the technologies that will win out.
00:41:05.940are fated by God. Oh, my God. Yes. So it's not just that the hierarchy of men over women is0.51
00:41:12.040natural. It's that the hierarchy of some tech companies over other tech companies mirrors that
00:41:19.280like quasi-divine select status. Yes. Becca, this shit is crazy. I'm sorry. I feel like I'm
00:41:27.320discovering fire. Your reaction is very validating because I've just been in a room for the past
00:41:35.240three years looking at this all saying this all the time he's like the providential superiority of
00:41:42.320stonks and in fact what happened was his his newsletter became so popular that it started
00:41:50.800creating what became known as the gilder effect this is in the late 90s where he would list the
00:41:57.460companies that he felt were the best companies that aligned with his paradigm and it would cause
00:42:03.240a rush on those stocks. So people would be waiting, waiting, waiting for the newsletter
00:42:07.800to drop. It would drop, and immediately people would rush to invest in the stocks he had listed,
00:42:13.760thus driving up the cost of those stocks. So he ended up having a great deal of economic power
00:42:19.060in Silicon Valley throughout all of kind of the first big web 1.0 dot-com era.
00:42:25.840This feels like a truth social kind of pump and dump style scheme, doesn't it?
00:42:30.480I'm thinking about, like, so many federal fraud and insider trading charges that could arise from this situation.
00:42:40.000Yes. Well, it's funny you should mention that because one of his big people that he loved to praise throughout the 1990s was Michael Milken, who had been the junk bond king in the 1980s.
00:42:54.500He got arrested for insider, arrested and convicted of insider trading.
00:42:58.100And Gilder loved to say that he was a misunderstood, heroic entrepreneur and that he was a visionary because a lot of the junk bonds he had invested in were telecommunications companies.
00:43:10.260And so basically what Gilder said is, you know, entrepreneurs should have more information than the general public because they need it to make these decisions.
00:43:20.480And so he was a defender of this guy who had been convicted of insider trading.
00:43:25.560And then Gilder went on to write this newsletter that, you know, had its own questionable ethics around this stuff.
00:45:13.840Well, you know, Sam Altman says AI can do that. I'm like, he's selling you AI. It's not shocking that he says it can do that. He is trying to get funding. Like, it's like the same way that like, well, the man said the snake oil would work. It's like, well, yeah, he was selling you the snake oil. Right.
00:45:28.840But like the way somehow we rely on the tech press, the Silicon Valley court press, as kind of a straightforward representation of reality, not understanding that like the massive valuations produced in and around Silicon Valley depend on the way these people talk about these businesses.
00:45:49.740Gilder is an early pioneer of that too, that he's like, oh, wait, these people will let me say anything.
00:45:54.920Yes. He was so invested in myth-making about entrepreneurs, and then he kind of was able to become an entrepreneur who did myth-making about himself and profited off of it.
00:46:09.860And I think that so many people have continued to do that where, as you say, with Sam Altman, who was able to both be the number one expert spokesperson about AI while also being the person selling you AI.
00:46:23.240Yeah. Part of Gilder's project was saying, you know, these tech entrepreneurs are the key to our future. We need to be trusting them. I mean, essentially, they were kind of, you know, quasi-godlike figures for Gilder. There was a real Christian spirituality to them.
00:46:40.440And he loved to attack, you know, feminists and their credentials and attack schooling and all of this stuff.
00:46:47.820And there is this real sense of like, no, entrepreneurs are the new experts in society.
00:46:53.560These are the people we put our trust in.
00:46:55.420Yeah. The other person that I can think of who thinks of the CEO as, well, either God or Jesus, depending on when you ask him.
00:47:02.520And who also has kind of very strong, I mean, more so than Elon Musk, for instance, religious convictions clearly undergirding his business investment is Peter Thiel.
00:47:12.660Do these hang out? Are they, you know, are they buds? What's going on?
00:47:17.460So they appear together sometimes and like they've done a debate together.
00:47:22.240Gilder still has a yearly tech conference that he hosts that Thiel has keynoted at.
00:47:28.260When Gilder was at the height of his influence in Silicon Valley in the 90s, Thiel hadn't become a startup founder yet. So he's kind of the next generation. But at that time, he and his friends were starting a right-wing newspaper at Stanford and were themselves becoming anti-feminist, anti-multiculturalism provocateurs.
00:47:53.360and really anti-gay, yeah, and came up in the right-wing think tank space before then pivoting
00:48:01.060to tech. And as Peter Thiel's biographer, Max Chavkin has written, seeing startups as the new
00:48:08.440think tanker publication, kind of startups as a way of doing politics. It's interesting that like
00:48:13.640sometimes it feels to me from, as somebody who is not an expert in this field, that the misogyny
00:48:20.220in this sort of like gender politics can sort of advance and recede over the course of Silicon
00:48:26.700Valley, right? Like it's obviously always been a very male space. And as you say, it's always been
00:48:32.180animated by these myths of masculinity. And it feels, at least from an outsider's perspective,
00:48:38.640that they sort of remember women every couple years and decide to make a case against women's
00:48:48.400equal rights. What do you think prompts these occasional returns to questions of reproductivity
00:48:54.340in the family in the sort of like a Gilderite Silicon Valley world? I have started to think
00:49:02.460about it a bit in terms of kind of, you know, you continually have the two sides of the masculine
00:49:07.560Silicon Valley coin. On the one hand, you have that visionary, optimistic masculinity of the
00:49:14.200entrepreneur. On the other hand, you have kind of the pessimistic, trolling, openly misogynist
00:49:19.640persona or mindset. And it feels like at moments of threat to the power of these entrepreneurs,
00:49:28.780you get this kind of lashing out, perhaps. Or I should say that's kind of my working hypothesis
00:49:35.940right now is that throughout the late 2000s, early 2010s, there didn't really need to be
00:49:43.420overt technology because everyone was handing the keys to the kingdom, to these founders anyways,
00:49:48.680right? Zuckerberg was ascendant. The PayPal mafia was ascendant. Everyone thought that
00:49:53.300Elon Musk was going to save the world. Was Elon Musk misogynist in his private life? Absolutely.
00:49:58.380We have a lot of accounts of that, but people in mainstream media weren't really critiquing that.
00:50:04.860And it wasn't until that became kind of post-2016, a big part of our conversations around tech
00:50:35.700that Silicon Valley's protagonists just keep shifting
00:50:37.960and changing and they tend to be quite young.
00:50:39.760And I think we have a lot harder time, especially I think with nerds, to really credit their deep misogyny when they're young.
00:50:48.240We're like, oh, well, you know, you just haven't lived enough yet or whatever, right?
00:50:51.640And like, it is just like a very different thing where they're like, you know, 70-year-old banking CEO is like, here's how I feel, you know?
00:50:58.140Or it's like this 25-year-old in a hoodie where you're like, oh, come on, it's fine.
00:51:02.020Like, kid doesn't know what he's saying, you know?
00:51:04.140And so I do also think that part of why they're getting called on it now is that Silicon Valley is aging.
00:51:09.460Silicon Valley is, we're aging with its products and with its protagonists.0.86
00:51:14.640And, you know, it's a familiarity that really breeds contempt that we're like, oh my God, you're not just uncool, you're retrograde and sort of a Nazi.0.84
00:51:23.840This reminds me, Adrian, of what we've talked about in our three models of conservative masculinity, the pervert, the preacher, and the creep.
00:51:30.680Silicon Valley really relies on the creep, who is somebody who perceives themselves as an outsider, even as they are accumulating status.
00:51:39.460right? But the creep's masculinity, and we also talked about this with Jordan in our episode on
00:51:44.160sci-fi and sci-fi fandoms conservatism, the creep masculinity that you see from so many of these
00:51:50.260Silicon Valley figures like Elon Musk, like Peter Thiel, I think George Gilder might be now their
00:51:55.700paradigmatic example, at least in my mind, is a sense of like wounded status of a rightful ascendancy
00:52:02.200and a rightful domination that has been denied, right? I think that might be a harder masculinity
00:52:08.680to embody or to stick to in those, you know, flush years when everybody is just shoveling
00:52:14.700you cash and nobody's asking too many questions about what your products actually do.