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Episode 154 -- Live from San Francisco, it's How to Become a Silicon Valley Creep (in 10 Easy Steps), Part 2 (Patreon)

Published:
2026-09-19 00:59:21
Imported:
2026-09

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Content

Here it is, the second half of our IBWTR live show, recorded with 250 of our closest friends at Swedish-American Hall in San Francisco! We continue our deep-ish dive into tech creep masculinity, and how it came to be so dominant at the present moment. A huge thank you to the folks at Swedish American Hall, to Andrew Roan Gibson for engineering the show, and to Mark Yoshizumi, who just turned around two of these episodes in a single week! For you lovely Patreon folks we have also exclusively uploaded the visuals from the show, in case you want to follow along!

If you'd like to learn more about tech creeps and what they're doing to society, governance, labor and our collective sense of possibility, check out Adrian's new book What Tech Calls Governing (available here).

Comments

kathleen

I want to write an English 101 paper applying the IBWTR taxonomy to Alasdair Gray's novel Poor Things. (Love the book and have since it was published but it's a weird one.) That's what happens when you wrap up a week that lasted foreverandeverandever and are too overstimulated to talk to people in actual person. And are now thinking about the bifurcation of the evolutionary line of pervercreep to pervert and creep. Where's the Missing Kink, Moira and Adrian? (Actually I'm going to watch a documentary about defecting Soviet hockey players because I've been promised espionage.)

Laura Cullen

Yes! Be like Creepy Elon and come to Austin (and then please take him back)!

Ariel

Ah, the Burning Man square on my metaphorical bingo card got crossed off. Excellent. Of course, because I grew up among the tech cohort and went to high school with the kids of moderately rich tech people, I was actually thinking of “my friend’s dad who had been OBSESSED with Burning Man for over a decade” as soon as I hit play.

Joy

Yes please to an origin of the creep and/or nice guy episode!

Tobias Heal

Listened to the game at the start and genuinely wondered: is Bryan Johnson just the reincarnated John Harvey Kellogg?

rock dove

I grew up in Reno which is the last large(ish) city before you get to burning man so I grew up with a deep hatred of burners. It happens around when we would go back to school so I have childhood memories of being at the grocery store with my mom trying to buy food for school lunches and everything was out of stock and it was full of the absolute rudest people ever trying to get their last purchases before heading out to the playa. I'm sure it's only gotten worse in the decades since I was a kid there but it's absolutely full of the worst people on the planet.

Karen Cox

Loved this as always. Please come to Austin!!

Karen Cox

Hello! I too live in Austin!! I would LOVE to have IBwtR here and meet my fellow fans!!

Laura Cullen

I'm a bit of a ways from Austin (about 50 miles) in a rural county kinda halfway to College Station, but I'll make the drive for Adrian and Moira!

Alex Davis

Id be really interested to hear if you had takes on the Rationalist/AI community, the If Anyone Builds It We All Die, Dario Amodei, Sam Altman kind of men. I think they're creeps but also kind of preachers but they preach for a dark AI god head of their own creating. They bizarre reaction to the linked in post from that Anthropic engineer who said "AI has a 10% chance of killing us all" and everyone else basically agreed with him but then went back to building their dark AI God head. I've read this piece about them https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/opinion/ai-silicon-valley.html but the author is a computer science professor and handles the engineering side of the story well but I think the analysis is somewhat shallow from a psychoanalytic standpoint and after hearing this and remembering the episode on AI Slop I think you're framework might be helpful. There is a weird sort of creep-resentment driven eschatological preachiness happening.

Meg C

Hey neighbors 👋🤠

Ursula Mäki

UK LIVE SHOW WHEN DIVAS?? MANCHESTER BECKONS YOU❗️

pixlaw

Listening to the questions at the end of this episode (which I enjoyed mightily, as always) reminded me of the ongoing right-wing fascination with the works of Robert Heinlein. One of your questioners referenced Starship Troopers which was, of course, taken from Heinlein's novel of the same name. But there's a LOT of correspondence between Heinlein's books and the tech oligarchy. Stranger in a Strange Land promoted the libertarian-coded thought adopted by Californian tech bros. But Farnham's Freehold postulated a weird post-apocalyptic bunker dweller with profoundly odd racial dimensions, while Moon Is a Harsh Mistress went all-in on libertarian revolutionary political action and destruction of dimwitted Earth-dwelling hordes. Don't even get me started on the disturbing psycho-sexual politics of Time Enough For Love. Which is a long way of saying, maybe you guys should take a look at him. I'd be surprised if Elon hadn't been influenced by him and his dreams of colonizing other planets with just the sweat of his brow and the help of a 1920s societal structure. And tech, can't forget that. One could argue that Heinlein was a proto-creep and I think that should be examined.

Astraea

My hot take: the Nice Guy (TM) is neither Pervert nor Creep, but is actually a proto-Preacher. (Like, idk, the first Pokemon incarnation whose final form is Preacher.) Think about it: the Nice Guy is, ultimately, utterly convinced of precisely two things. First, that he is a Good Guy, which I have always understood to include a self-professed moral component. Second, that he deserves adulation and rewards for being such a Good Guy, up to and including pussy on demand and a live-in maid/chef. For all that you find a lot of Nice Guys on the left, the actual ideology that underpins his actions is *aggressively* traditional gender norms, backed up by a moral certainly that this is what he deserves because he has "followed the rules." He thinks he's treated people in the way he's been told he should treat them - the way that wins him public praise - and therefore is owed the reward that was implicitly promised if he did that (sex, a wife/live-in partner, kids). To me, that all reads very Preachery. A Nice Guy can become a creep if he's denied often enough, but I think the underlying ideology is so strongly based on traditional gender norms (and an utter conviction of your own moral behavior) that it fits much better in the Preacher camp.

Astraea

The Silver Age authors had some *things* going on when it came to gender roles and social hierarchies, that's for damn sure.

Astraea

My personal theory is that they all want to be gods, or at least treated as such. This opinion is strongly colored by the fact that I'm pretty unimpressed with Gen AI, though, because I've taken literally any CS course and I understand that LLMs can't do half the things these companies want us to believe. (It's a relaxation algorithm with a top hat, guys, calm the fuck down. Chi-squared on steroids. It's not fucking magic, and while you CAN get almost any fit if you have enough variables, that doesn't actually eliminate the statistical limitations of your results, because those are always present. Math's a bitch, and she'll have her due.)

Astraea

Also critical: when a woman denies sex or accolades to a Nice Guy (TM), his immediate recourse is to shame her sexuality: "slut," "whore," etc. A woman he wants having sex with *him* is right and proper; her having sex with anyone *else* is wrong and something she must be publicly shamed for. This feels more Preacher-y to me than anything else; a Pervert would call her a bitch (possibly "frigid bitch"). A Creep could go either way, I think (?).

Lu

Thank you for this episode. It was refreshing to hear you all mock these creeps because it's the only thing they deserve. I am sick and tired of every media outlet telling us every day that these "geniuses" are working on AI technology that will wipe out humanity in 10 years and we can't do anything about it. They talk about AI as if we're in a sci fi movie. Robots will turn EVIL. Humanity will get what it DESERVES! No one talks about the root of the problem - wealth distribution, and the fact that these "geniuses" and their investors are...creeps.

Cara

“The left wing creep is in a humanities PhD program” is - just perfectly on the nose, lol. The specter of several specific gangly white dudes sprang into my mind immediately.

Charlotte

The book ad totally worked on me, I ordered both "Was das Valley denken nennt" and "Was das Valley herrschen nennt" (hadn't seen that the latter was out in German since March) and they arrived today.

Ariel

The current demographics at Burning Man are solidly in “wealthy white midlife crisis event,” and have been for while. As far as I know Brent Dill/Black Lotus aren’t operating anymore, so at least that’s one rape cult down?

Ariel

Oh, man, it’s so much weirder than that, unfortunately. Preachers might be accurate. Edit: thinking for a bit, the combo of superiority, weird sex stuff, eugenics, and CHRONIC nerd references but in the least deep way imaginable fits them into Creep. The Rationalists built a millenarian religion where, before Gen AI was anywhere near what it is today, they became convinced that super-intelligent AI was inevitable, and that one of the key concerns was whether it would decide to kill all of humanity. Thus, they decided that they needed to be the people developing said AI in order to ensure that it wouldn’t be evil. They went on to work at OpenAI, and when Anthropic was formed, most of the people who went from OpenAI to Anthropic were either Rationalists or influenced by them. Most of the AI research and oversight communities are also infested with these people. In my experience, most of them don’t realize that they’re experiencing a religious phenomena. Most of the people in the AI space who simultaneously talk about the risk of AI killing everyone and rush to be the first ones to develop it are dead serious in their beliefs, and genuinely think this is how best to save the world. They’re just also disconnected from actual reality. Sam Altman, based on everything I can see, is not one of these people, and has used them to become very rich. He’s untrustworthy for different reasons. They also have weird stuff around sex (people around them describe feeling obligated to go to their kinky sex parties for professional advancement), and if I remember correctly at least one of their leading thinkers is a pretty open racist and eugenicist? There’s so much more, but idk how much you want to learn about the Berkeley cult scene in Patreon comments.

pixlaw

Embarrassing to admit that I'd just completely blanked on the fact that Elon's Grok's name was just a complete cop from Stranger From A Strange Land!

testosteronefemme

re: the abhorrence of death, i think this was talked about in part 1, but that brian whoever the fuck guy who weighs his stools - that is something you would find in an ana/mia forum. like that's straightforwardly an eating disorder, and on the extreme end of the spectrum at that. and one of the things i find really interesting about this whole creep masculinity and its terror around death and their obsession with youth is a) the overlap with like broader pedophilic cultural and probably personal impulses, in that women can't age, but they can't either. and b) the ways in which we are watching men with more money than sense experiencing a midlife crisis essentially engage in the same kind of ED behavior that we would find pathological in women, which i think comes from the same kind of body fascism which drives EDs more broadly. all this to say, i would be interested in an episode diving into the tortured relationship these creeps have with their own mortality and their own bodies.

Allen

You can see the aggrieved, socially maladjusted, and culturally impoverished isolation of the Silicon Valley Creep in the very design of the Internet, social media algorithms and “metrics”, and of course, AI. It’s a Creep world, we’re just living in it. Not only are these insanely rich and powerful assholes evil, they’re fucking *annoying* as all hell. And as if that weren’t enough. they’re giving the rest of us socially awkward nerds a bad name, and that’s just unforgivable. Great episodes, as usual!

Allen

Yeah, there’s often a veneer of “benevolent sexism” among these guys that then goes mask off misogyny when they’ve been rejected. I agree that that’s very Preacher-coded.

Astraea

Seconding this! I would love an episode on these creeps' dread and abhorrence of mortality.

Astraea

Alas, I can confirm there are more than a few in STEM PhD programs as well.

James Talley

Um, Brian Johnson was the nerd character's name in The Breakfast Club. Coincidence? I think not! (Okay, yes, probably, fine.)

Kathryn m

My absolute dream is for there to be a live show with podcast legends Moira, Adrian, Eleanor Janega and Kate Lister. Manchester seems like a good location for that, no?

RFB

And may I suggest that Henry VIII has to get a look in for creep history? (a whole bunch of other royal men deserve to be in there but he went to *lengths* because his need for a son to hold onto power was so much more important than anything/anybody else)

CassieWasRight

We talked about right wing creeps, left wing creeps, but now I'm curious about Centrist Creeps. I feel like both Rahm Emanuel (rare non-Bay Area creep) and Gavin Newsom fit this pretty well - though I guess arguably the path toward eugenics for both of them goes through genocidal Zionism

Kat

I think the Nice Guy is the left wing creep

Dan Wood

Please come to DC-Baltimore!!