Weird Bros

The Prospera representative opened by saying "We are inventing a new industry, that we are calling ‘Governance-as-a-Service... We partner with host countries to basically provide the services that governments typically provide... it’s a full-stack governance solution.”
🤮

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This is of course part of the attraction of the Network State idea to the tech billionaires - getting around regulations to try alleged breakthrough treatments without waiting for testing/approvals.

(In Trump 1, Thiel unsuccessfully asked for Balaji to lead the FDA, to try the same in the US.)

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YouTube video by Network State Podcast 14 - Network State Conference 2025 - Lonis Hamali on Próspera

At the recent Network State conference, a representative from Prospera (the network state in the Honduras funded by Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan and Marc Andreessen) said that recently the Kardashians had visited, to undergo a non-FDA-approved 'longevity treatment'.

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youtu.be/QrqBlAf2XLk

Top comment beneath Joe Rogan episode on Spotify that reads “Nick Fuentes button” which has 1400 reactions

The top comment on Spotify beneath a recent Joe Rogan episode 🤦🏼‍♂️

1.1k of those 1.4k reactions are hearts.

Dark times.

Please enjoy this awkward moment during Elon Musk's recent appearace on the All-In podcast, when the hosts brought up that it was 3 years since he took over Twitter.

Are you in Australia at the moment? Or did Metallica just finish a Canada run?

The Mechanical Turk rides again: Tesla's shady unveil of their 'autonomous' Optimus robots Last week, Elon Musk unveiled the latest iteration of Tesla’s ‘Optimus’ robot at their ‘We Robot’ event, held at Warner Bros studios in Los Angeles. “I think this will be the biggest product ever, of ...

Still amazes me that a year ago Tesla and Elon Musk unveiled their 'Optimus' robots and pretended they were autonomous in order to bump the company share price, never officially admitting that they were remote-controlled by humans, and nobody seems to care.

www.dailygrail.com/2024/10/the-...

Elon Musk Wants ‘Strong Influence’ Over the ‘Robot Army’ He’s Building In a Tesla earnings call Wednesday, the world’s richest man pondered the future of his company’s Optimus robots—and his control over them.

I feel like this headline is a bit like the AI doomerism - mostly about gaining publicity that helps convince the general public that the technology is formidable and imminent.

www.wired.com/story/elon-m...

= IHUFFPOSTI "Basically, I'm just fed up with the fact that I'm cis-gendered, I'm a white male, and I lean right, towards the Republican side," said Fears, 28, wearing a pin of the 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf of the Waffen-SS. "And I get demonized if I don't accept certain things."

Time to re-up one of the great quotes of all time...while the Totenkopf is in the discourse. www.huffpost.com/entry/attemp...

Should have made clear: the weird cuts are in the original video, they're not done by me to stitch quotes together.

YouTube video by Network State Podcast 29 - Network State Conference 2025 - Ben Horowitz of a16z on Netscape and Network States

Source:

youtu.be/gNPX_Ku4jbg

At the recent Network State Conference, Ben Horowitz of Andreessen-Horowitz (a16z) told Balaji Srinivasan that the prominent tech VC firm "believed in the whole thing [the Network State ideology] from 'The Sovereign Individual' on up", and wants to be a part of it.

I think this said it best:

bsky.app/profile/esgh...

Not so much petty trivia when it all sits with the framework of accelerationism and Thiel saying Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist and so on. It's just another piece of the greater picture of their toxic philosophies and worldview.

I interviewed Paulina Borsook, who warned of tech culture's toxic underbelly over 30 years ago.

She wrote a prescient and scathing book, "Cyberselfish."

It tanked her career, but a new generation is discovering her work as tech fascism tries to kill democracy 👇

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL-k...

If anyone thinks Thiel's view is a one-off, note that Palmer Luckey of weapons company Anduril (another part of the Thielverse) gave a talk at Thiel's Hereticon in 2024 in which he said the Na'avi in James Cameron's 'Avatar' were the bad guys for stopping progress.

(I originally saw this in Max Chafkin's (@chafkin.bsky.social) excellent biography of Thiel 'The Contrarian', but wasn't sure what Thiel had said exactly.

The magazine he cited as the source was shuttered a while back but is still available via the Wayback Machine

web.archive.org/web/20111118... )

Text from a 2011 article on Peter Thiel in 'Details' magazine: "A devoted J.R.R. Tolkien fan from an early age, Thiel is equally enamored with Kirill Eskov's The Last Ringbearer, a retelling of The Lord of the Rings in which Sauron is a beleaguered victim and the elves are bellicosely bent on world domination. "Gandalf's the crazy person who wants to start a war," Thiel explains, "and Mordor is this technological civilization based on reason and science. Outside of Mordor, it's all sort of mystical and environmental and nothing works. Anyway, it's really clever.""

A reminder that Peter Thiel loves a piece of Tolkien fan-fiction that paints Sauron and Mordor as the good guys because they're a "technological civilization", while the elves, hobbits and men are bad because they're all "mystical and environmental"...

Can’t disagree with you, his brain is mush at this point

The numerology stuff sent me 😂

You can tell the Trump administration is on the right side of history by the way they all use disappearing messages in Signal for their communication... /snark

Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist The political svengali and investor has been giving lectures on ‘an evil king or tyrant … who appears in the end times’

Source:

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Text from an article in the Guardian on Peter Thiel's Antichrist lecture series: "Thiel argues that, in order for the antichrist to be able to pull off the Armageddon in one lifetime, they need to be young today – he points to 33 as an auspicious number. In these quotes, he draws parallels to powerful figures who died at the age of 33, including Jesus, Buddha and some literary characters: 'Christ only lived to age 33 and became history’s greatest man. The antichrist has to somehow outdo this. I don’t want to be way too literal on the 33 number – I’d rather stress the antichrist will be a youthful conqueror; maybe in our gerontocracy, 66 is the new 33. But something like these numbers do occur almost mystically through a number of different contexts. Buddha begins his travels at age 30 and experiences Nirvana, ego death, at age 33. But I had to be ecumenical and say something nice about Islam. One idea that’s pretty cool is, when you’re reborn into your afterlife, you’re born into your 33-year-old self. Your 33-year-old self is your best self. Livy’s – the Roman historian’s 33rd chapter of the 33rd book – it announces this 33-year-old conqueror. It’s like Alexander at the peak of his power. Or even in Tolkien, the hobbits have a coming-of-age ceremony at 33. That’s how old Frodo is when he inherits the ring.'

There was plenty of unhinged stuff in Peter Thiel's Antichrist lecture series, but I don't think enough people have appreciated/laughed their asses off at the fact that in his little numerological riff HE INCLUDED A FICTIONAL CHARACTER as if it was meaningful. 😂

Okay, gotcha - thanks for expanding on that! 🙂

The War on Suffering The war on suffering has not only robbed us of resilience. It has sold us a mirage that is making us miserable.

Katherine Boyle is a partner of tech billionaire Marc Andreessen. In 2023, she wrote that there’s a “war on suffering,” which has “robbed us of resilience.” She blamed Roe v Wade & the decision to make military service optional. She said that this “war” coincided w/ the decline of religiosity. 1/

Also: Pretty funny that they just left Joe Lonsdale off there 😂

The graph says "PayPal's insane talent density" but all I see is "How having money makes you more money"

No doubt, which is why I was confused that your original post seemed to suggest Christians might be shocked at its 'heretical' content, when most of the topics discussed would not really be shocking to them (trad wives, intelligent design, the apocalypse etc).

There's a 1000 things that Peter Theil can be condemned/ridiculed for, but Hereticon isn't really a celebration of Christian heresy - nearly all the speakers discuss political/scientific topics, and if anything, they sneak in some Christian stuff to pill everyone with (Thiel on the apocalypse, etc)

How Silicon Valley Became a Center of Reactionary, Anti-Democratic Politics With 881,000 people living in less than 47 square miles, San Francisco packs a tremendous amount of wealth and cultural influence into a fiercely unequal city. San Francisco is far smaller than Los…

This article discusses how the “network state” Tech Bros have noticed—and aren’t exactly pleased about—Gil Duran’s work exposing their movement. 10/15/25 … 1/ lithub.com/how-silicon-...