The Cult of Rationalism in Silicon Valley
Angry Planet
Matthew Gault
4.3 • 882 Ratings
🗓️ 25 March 2025
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A lot of the people designing America’s technology and close to the center of American power believe some deeply weird shit. We already talked to journalist Gil Duran about the Nerd Reich, the rise of the destructive anti-democratic ideology. In this episode, we dive into another weird section of Silicon Valley: the cult of Rationalism.
Max Read, the journalist behind the Read Max Substack, is here to help us through it. Rationalism is responsible for a lot more than you might think and Read lays out how it’s influenced the world we live in today and how it created the environment for a cult that’s got a body count.
- Defining rationalism: “Something between a movement, a community, and a self-help program.”
- Eliezer Yudkowsky and the dangers of AI
- What the hell is AGI?
- The Singleton Guide to Global Governance
- The danger of thought experiments
- As always, follow the money
- Vulgar bayesianism
- What’s a Zizian?
- Sith Vegans
- Anselm: Ontological Argument for God’s Existence
- SBF and Effective Altruism
The Zizians and the Rationalist death cults
Explaining Roko’s Basilisk, the Thought Experiment That Brought Elon Musk and Grimes Together
The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians
The Government Knows AGI is Coming | The Ezra Klein Show
The archived ‘Is Trump Racist’ rational post
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Transcript
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| 0:44.7 | hello and welcome to angry planet i am mat Matthew Galt. Jason, say hello. Hello. |
| 0:58.6 | So I'm imagining today as a part two of the conversation that we started with Gilderan a couple weeks ago, which is about the broader ideologies that rule us now. |
| 1:08.4 | The first one you should go back and listen to you if you haven't, |
| 1:11.3 | dear listener, was about the Lords of Silicon Valley, their ideas about techno feudalism and how |
| 1:16.2 | they are changing America. This one is about a more widespread, in some ways, more pernicious |
| 1:21.7 | ideology. Welcome to the cult of rationalism. And here to help us understand all of this is journalist |
| 1:28.0 | Max Reed of the Readmax Substack and podcast. Sir, thank you so much for joining us. |
| 1:33.7 | Thank you for having me. So I've been circling around this for a while and there were kind of two |
| 1:38.4 | things. I've been circling around doing an episode about this for a while and there have been kind of |
| 1:42.5 | two incidents in my life that really kind of pushed me along. One was that I'm friends with a woman |
| 1:48.7 | who's a fan of the show and a friend of the show, who was kind of involved in these rationalist |
| 1:55.4 | communities for a long time, and has for a long time told me this is like, this is a cult. And I |
... |
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