Pod Insights Decoder Why tech billionaires want a ‘corporate dictatorship’ About this episode This is Jon Fortt, CNBC journalist. I’m guest-hosting for a couple more episodes of Decoder this summer while Nilay is out on parental leave. Today, I’m talking with a very special guest: Gil Duran, an old friend, journalist, and author of The Nerd Reich, a newsletter and forthcoming book about the shifting politics of Silicon Valley and the rise of tech authoritarianism.
Links:
Is Peter Thiel the Antichrist? NYT didn’t think to ask | The Nerd Reich
How tech authoritarianism becomes reality | The Nerd Reich
Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America | The New Yorker
The rise of techno-authoritarianism | The Atlantic
JD Vance thinks monarchists have some good ideas | The Verge
Startups meeting with Trump officials to push for deregulated ‘Freedom Cities’ | Wired
Peter Thiel-linked startup wants to build the “next great city” in Greenland | Inside Hook
Bitcoin could replace dollar If US debt grows says Coinbase CEO | CryptoSlate
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript 10,974 words · 11 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 Give you and your team more time to focus on the work that matters. This is AMEX Corporate, one intelligent platform for company spending. With smart expense management to help capture details, categorize spend, and streamline expense submission and approval, there's less manual work for your team and greater visibility and control for you. Built to simplify, designed to scale. Get started at go.amex/ammexcorporate. Terms apply.
0:30 Speaker 01 Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them? That's bull spend. And marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.
0:39 Speaker 02 I remember telling my boss, "It'll be good for the brand," when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.
0:47 Speaker 01 Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.
1:00 Speaker 03 College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.
1:32 Speaker 04 Hello and welcome to Decoder. This is John Fort, CNBC journalist, co-host of Closing Bell Overtime, and creator of the Fort Knox streaming series on LinkedIn. I'm guest hosting for a couple more episodes of Decoder this summer while Neelai is out on parental leave. Today, I'm talking with a very special guest, Gil Duran, an old friend, journalist, and author of The Nerd Reich, a newsletter and forthcoming book about the shifting politics of Silicon Valley and the rise of tech authoritarianism. I've known Gil for a very long time. We met at the end of high school and went to college together, and we were also colleagues at the San Jose Mercury News. Gil has had a fascinating career that spans both media and politics.
2:13 Speaker 04 He's worked as press secretary and comms director for high-profile California politicians like Governor Jerry Brown and Senator Dianne Feinstein, and he also advised Kamala Harris when she served as California's Attorney General.
2:28 Speaker 04 Now, writing The Nerd Reich, Gill is focused on a new type of story, one he says has gone woefully under-covered by mainstream media. That story is the influence of not just big money, but specifically tech money on politics and society at large, and the disturbing philosophical undercurrents that are driving it. The Nerd Reich, as Gill sees it, is a web of powerful, ultra-wealthy tech billionaires, people like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and others, whose politics and influence now sees them pushing the country further and further away from democracy and towards something resembling a kind of cross between unrestrained capitalism and monarchy. This idea has been kicking around for quite a while now.
3:11 Speaker 04 You'll hear Gill refer to it as "the dark enlightenment," or, as some refer to it, "the neo-reactionary movement." Some central characters here include Curtis Yarvin, an influential anti-democracy blogger whose ideas once stood far outside mainstream acceptability, but who in recent years has captured the attention of politicians like Vice President J.D. Vance. And that's Gill's central thesis here, that while these ideas are not new, they're embraced by some of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet, is a relatively recent phenomenon, one that's been supercharged by President Trump's reelection. Now that these ideas have entered the White House by way of the MAGA movement, Gill argues that it's created a dangerous coalition between the far-right and the stewards of the biggest,
3:55 Speaker 04 most popular tech platforms and products. After all, as we've seen with Elon and Doge, these tech billionaires aren't just sitting in the shadows, they want to tear down and rebuild the government from the ground up. Gill is one of the sharpest thinkers on this subject, and he never shies away from saying what he really thinks. So I think you'll find this conversation very illuminating. I know I did. Okay. The Nerd Reich author, Gil Duran. Here we go.
4:33 Speaker 04 Gil Duran, great to have you here on Decoder.
4:36 Speaker 05 Thanks for having me.
4:37 Speaker 04 We're going to talk Nerd Reich, of course, because that's what you write, what you podcast, what you do. But first, a disclosure. You and I first met 31 years ago as high school seniors. Got the same journalism scholarship, went to the same college, and are friends. And we started our journalism careers. You focused more on culture, government, politics. I focused more on business and tech. You've gone on to a brilliant and wide-ranging career. You've run communications for a who's who of California politics, Jerry Brown, Kamala Harris, Antonio
5:16 Speaker 04 Villagrosa, Dianne Feinstein. But that's a bit of a past life for you. In this moment, our worlds collide, right? The government culture stuff and the business tech stuff. What is the Nerd Reich?
5:31 Speaker 05 The Nerd Reich is a term that some people use to describe a cultish group of tech billionaires who basically seek to replace democracy with something resembling corporate dictatorship. And some people call this movement the Dark Enlightenment, or the Neo-Reactionary Movement, or the Network State. And it's backed by a handful of CEOs and billionaires, people like Marc Andreessen, Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, with involvement from people like Sam Altman, and the granddaddy of them all, Peter Thiel, who's been promoting some of these ideas for decades.
6:10 Speaker 04 What's wrong with it?
6:11 Speaker 05 Well, say it's inherently anti-American. It sees a post-United States world where, instead of democracy, we will have, basically, tech feudalism, fiefdoms run by tech corporations. They are pretty explicit about this point. And, you know, we did Political Science 101 together at DePaul. And I would say that there is a conversation in academia about the long-term health of the nation-state in the 21st century. And these guys are sort of tapping into that and proposing a product or a model that will put them at the supreme head of world government in the future.
6:56 Speaker 05 But I think before we go about trying to change the nation or change the nation-state, we should probably discuss that idea with the American people. So, in a nutshell, you have a group of super-rich elites with a very apocalyptic vision of where society and the world are headed. And they are rushing ahead with what they think is the solution, a solution that, by the way, will also put a crown on their heads.
7:21 Speaker 04 This reminds me of some themes from a book I read in high school, Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead. And I think you and I might have talked about this freshman year in college as well. It's more in line with another Rand book, Atlas Shrugged. It's very convincing when you're reading it as a teenager, and maybe also as a billionaire. But this idea that, hey, there are some people out there who are just more productive as capitalists, and capitalism is good, it's the lifeblood of society, and these are the people we need to be running things, not these altruistic, mealy-mouthed, progressive people who are just watering everything down and making everything mediocre.
8:06 Speaker 05 It's definitely an ideology of tech supremacy. This idea that if you have billions of dollars and you've created some tech product that's valuable, that makes you good at everything. I think there's an old Giddish saying, "If you're rich, you're also handsome and can sing." So it's this idea that because you're rich, you can now do everything. We see this sort of Dunning-Kruger approach with everyone from Elon Musk to Jeff Bezos.
8:31 Speaker 05 Going into businesses where they have no experience and sort of making a mess of things. So they're trying to do that basic idea with governance. And you're right, a lot of people trace this back to ideas like Golz Gulch. It's an idea we find throughout science fiction, this idea of these enclaves of tech elites controlling everything. Usually they're the bad guys. And for the life of me, I can't understand why these guys have decided to overtly be the bad guys in science fiction. But these are ideas that really collapse under the weight of reality, because governing and getting the consent of the governed is a longstanding historical problem. And the best we've gotten in our thousands of years
9:14 Speaker 05 is figuring out something like the democracy we have right now. And the idea that we're just going to replace it with these corporate fiefdoms. There's a lot they haven't thought through. And it becomes very obvious the moment you start probing beneath the surface.
9:27 Speaker 04 One of the leader, leading thinkers on the tech billionaire side of this is a guy named Curtis Yarvin, right? He recently had a debate at Harvard, and he seems to have done pretty well. How would you frame how Yarvin approaches these things?
9:47 Speaker 05 Yarvin is a computer programmer and a pseudo-intellectual who, in the early 2000s, started inventing his own theory of politics, largely catering to this idea that instead of a democracy, we needed dictatorship, that we'd be better off with a monarchy. And going into great detail about how to create this new system, which involved breaking up the nation-state into smaller territories, he called patchworks, which would then be governed by totalitarian corporations. For example, he envisioned a San Francisco in the future that would be called Friskorp, run by a corporation called Friskorp, where everybody would be under constant and total surveillance. Even in the privacy of their own homes, and this is what would ensure your security,
10:32 Speaker 05 and you'd need to swipe in and swipe out to get in or out of the city, and the government of the city would have total power over you. They could kill you if you want. You'd have no rights. The only thing you'd be able to do is to leave to vote with your feet, which is sort of underestimating how authoritarian governments work, because if everybody could just leave, people would just leave North Korea, you know, China, all these countries. They don't do that for a reason because they're not allowed to.
10:55 Speaker 04 Or, or, or maybe it's Singapore.
10:58 Speaker 05 Or, I guess, well, that's one idea it's become. So, a few years later, Balasubramanian Vasan, who's the former CTO of Coinbase, a former Andreessen Horowitz partner, and a friend of both Yarvin and Peter Thiel, and that's an important part. Peter Thiel has a longstanding association with Yarvin, funded his company for years, and has named him in conversations. He's an inspiration. He's considered Peter Thiel's house philosopher. The association with Yarvin makes it kind of creepy because he has some weird ideas about what we do with poor people, and a lot of genocidal language occurs through the writings of Yarvin. So Balasubramanian Vasan tries to update it to something called the network state and puts out this whole book, where basically tries to rebrand it
11:39 Speaker 05 as a corporate, safe idea. We have to start thinking about sovereignty. But he also has some pretty nutty ideas about how that would look.
11:48 Speaker 04 So, I guess if I were to take the other side, which I sort of have to, to keep it interesting, one could say that Yarvin's ideas aren't so far from, say, Alexander Hamilton's. Hamilton versus Jefferson was a healthy dynamic in the formation of American ideas, right? And Hamilton was accused of being a monarchist. He was pretty clearly in favor of smart and often rich people having a lot more power and say over how things went than everybody else. And Thomas Jefferson, despite his, his many contradictions and hypocrisies, was the, he was the man of the people, right? The pro-democracy guy.
12:29 Speaker 05 Well, I think Yarvin would like that comparison. I don't think he deserves it. You know, you've basically got a failed startup founder. His product has never really done what it was supposed to do. If you can't create that world, how can you deal with the rest of it? You know, I've actually been in government at City Hall in the state Capitol in Sacramento. There are some hard decisions, some complex issues that don't lend themselves to this sort of simplistic thinking of a bunch of guys who spend all their lives with their necks craned over their computers in the code, right? And that's what they just don't get. That's the missing element of their ideas. You know, he's not
13:07 Speaker 05 a PhD in anything, in history. And if you talk to political scientists and historians, as I have been doing, because I'm writing a book on this subject, they just, it's almost an insult to bring up his ideas to them because they make no sense. And they immediately go deep into all the philosophers and thinkers and historians who have debunked the basic ideas here. So they're operating at a basic level, almost like high schoolers arguing, you know, or us, maybe freshman year arguing over golts, golts, or we had some weird debates over stuff that neither of us really knew about, but we were really going to be right about it. And that's what they're doing, except they're grown men. And the problem
13:47 Speaker 05 is when you get these billionaires who maybe haven't matured as fast as their finances have, they think these are great ideas and they push them. And then unfortunately, the rest of us have to deal with them.
14:01 Speaker 04 At the root of it, we're at a time where the broader public, at least big segments of the broader public, seem to have lost faith in the ideas of expertise, of institutions. So you say, he doesn't have a PhD. There are a lot of people who are like, yay, no PhD. He didn't get a PhD in this from Harvard. Boo Harvard. What's going on with? Perhaps the framing of the American promise where we've got now a time where people are lionizing those who have made a lot of money over those who have gained knowledge
14:46 Speaker 04 or experience in a given area. It seems like the result of some failed promise.
14:51 Speaker 05 Well, definitely. Well, we have a media that largely glamorizes the wealthy and makes them seem like they're better than everybody else. I think we've got a longstanding culture in which wealth is seen as proof that you're better, that you're more hardworking, that you're morally superior. And so there's a lot flowing toward that. I mean, our president of the United States is a guy who played the stereotype of a rich guy on TV in the eighties and the nineties, right? Donald Trump has always been there with this gold-plated kitschy image that he projects. But I think it's starting to fall short in some ways. I mean, I think when the effects of these tariffs hit, you know, his poll numbers are sinking, people are learning in their own ways that great wealth doesn't equal wisdom
15:34 Speaker 05 and doesn't equal leadership. And Trump has been able to get pretty far on an illusion, but there's only one Donald Trump. And whether you love him or you hate him, there's no denying that he's had this longstanding charismatic relationship with the American people. You don't get that with Elon Musk. You don't get that with Peter Thiel, who can barely choke out a sentence that's comprehensible. And you certainly don't get that with Curtis Yarvin. And if I had a big budget, I would definitely put ads targeting MAGA showing them the stuff these guys are saying, the stuff these guys are talking about. Because these guys have nothing in common with your red hat-wearing Republican. They look down
16:14 Speaker 05 on those people, too. Unfortunately, the only person making this point is someone I also despise politically, Steve Bannon. He has been telling people about this stuff, about the transhumanism and the network state and all these weird ideas that they plan to impose on people. And so I think the bigger problem is we haven't really had a discussion about any of this stuff, because largely there's been a media blackout on it. I think editors think it's too weird and esoteric. Unfortunately, it's being shoved in our face more and more with every passing month. And we're way past the point of being able to ignore it. I mean, I'm surprised The New Yorker did this stuff before The New York Times, The Washington Post, you know, I was writing stuff last year that they're just getting around to now. And believe me, as happy as
16:59 Speaker 05 I am to be a freelance writer who found an important story, I shouldn't have been the guy talking about this last year. And last year is when the American people deserve to know about this stuff.
17:10 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think we might be in a place where certain publications are trying not to seem weird and in the process, perhaps not covering certain things. But Yarvin would claim, not would, he does, that the FDR presidency is the model for what America needs now, right? He talks about the amount of power that FDR concentrated. FDR, coming out of the Gilded Age, sure, had a lot of power, made a lot of decisions that one would easily argue were important. Is that wrong?
17:48 Speaker 05 Well, he mischaracterizes FDR as a monarch or a dictator, which is not true, because FDR got elected. FDR was beloved. And after FDR left, someone else took his place, who was not a member of his family. And after that, a few years later, someone from an opposite party was in charge. So that's how the American government works. But here's the clue, and I think why he's obsessed with FDR. FDR was an emergency wartime president. He was president during the Depression, World War II, a time of great crisis. And because of that crisis, he was given more power to make things happen quickly in defense of the nation. And now we see what? Donald Trump trying to declare emergencies everywhere
18:31 Speaker 05 in order to get more power and without having to go through Congress and without having to go through the usual checks and balances. So I really think the key there is to understand the degree to which they see the use of emergency powers as the easiest way to expand the power of the executives. Today, I wrote a piece at The Nerd Reich, a startup here in California is proposing that Donald Trump declare a national security emergency to allow them to build a little network state tech hub on the island of Alameda. On a former naval base where there happens to be endangered migratory bird habitats. So everywhere we look, even this ridiculous example today, we're seeing this desire for
19:16 Speaker 05 an emergency, which is a way to grab power. And so I think that's the key to understanding Yarvin's slandering obsession with FDR is the emergency powers.
19:27 Speaker 04 The idea of an emergency, and this, I think, is a thread throughout law, right? But emergencies are hard to define. And the one recent example, and, you know, recent this year, is the situation in LA, right, around these protests. And were they mostly peaceful protests, or were they riots and insurrections? And it just sort of depends on whose social media feed you're looking at, or what news channel you happen to watch the most and how that gets framed. So emergency, in a way, is in the eye of the beholder and
20:11 Speaker 04 in the context of where the beholder thinks the country's heading, no?
20:16 Speaker 05 Well, I guess to some degree, definitely when you look at different feeds, you're seeing different things. But in California, when there's an emergency, the governor has the powers to act, right? The big thing with LA was that the mayor and the governor both made it clear that they had the situation under control. The LAPD and the LA Sheriff's Department were handling the situation. If someone needs to call in the National Guard, that's the governor's job. The governor called in the National Guard back in 2020 when there was several days of destruction and violence in Sacramento. So what this really was, was Trump seizing on the perception created by Fox News and Elon Musk's ex to insert himself
20:58 Speaker 05 as the hero of an emergency that just didn't exist. Yes, there were protests. Yes, a small portion of them had some property destruction and vandalism, but no one involved in the situation needed Donald Trump to interfere. He politicized the situation and inserted himself. And what he did actually was try to create a crisis because he knew that would create more of a backlash from people in California. And more than anything right now, Donald Trump wants confrontation. So-
21:29 Speaker 05 Like with Silicon Valley, they're always crying about a crisis that they're actually rushing to create at the same time, you know, like AI will kill us all, let's rush to create it. This is like a strange mentality, but only we can solve the emergency that we create seems to be the the logic there.
21:47 Speaker 04 Another thing I find interesting about the FDR argument that Yarvin makes is that FDR sort of started social safety nets, big government expansion, massive economic stimulus, labor rights support. He arguably laid the groundwork for the great society. That doesn't sound like what this crowd wants to repeat.
22:11 Speaker 05 No, they want to use the powers of a dictatorship to go in an opposite direction. A lot of this is about pulling out of the social contract. And a lot of these ideas can be traced back to a 1997 book called The Sovereign Individual, which predicted that in the 21st century, the coming information age would eliminate most jobs, and that this would lead to violence and chaos and societal degradation as people no longer had money, could no longer afford anything, but that a new technology called cyber currency would allow a certain cognitive elite, people who can become wealthy off of this new information age, to rise in power and create their own little fortress societies where they would
22:54 Speaker 05 be safe as everything fell apart outside of the walls. We have a bunch of CEOs telling us that AI is gonna get rid of millions and millions of jobs. Well, what's gonna happen to those people who can no longer work, right? What is their future? What is the future of their children? They say, well, AI will create other jobs. Well, what I'm hearing is that AI will just continuously improve and take away the jobs it creates. You know, there's this thing that doesn't quite add up, and some of them talk about universal basic income and everyone getting a share of the profits. Well, that sounds a lot like Silicon Valley socialism. And what does freedom look like in Sam Altman's universal basic income universe? What does democracy look like when you don't get to eat unless someone like Elon Musk
23:39 Speaker 05 is approving of your existence? And there's a question there that these guys sort of hint at, but never answer. And I think that that's a place where we have to go in politics. We got to talk about what the future looks like if they're gonna kill all jobs.
23:57 Speaker 04 We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
24:08 Speaker 01 Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard? But not the pipeline? That's bull spend, and marketers are calling it out in. Dashboard Confessions.
24:18 Speaker 02 My boss asked for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had: impressions.
24:25 Speaker 01 Cut the bull spend. See revenue, not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.
24:38 Speaker 03 College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.
25:09 Speaker 06 This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies. 18 plus.
25:38 Speaker 04 We're back with the nerd Reich author Gil Duran, talking about the influence of big tech money on politics and some of the outlandish ambitions of Silicon Valley billionaires.
25:49 Speaker 04 So what's the solution then? Because short of regulating AI out of existence, if indeed we are heading toward this AGI and this super smart software that eliminates a bunch of jobs and very often that isn't what ends up happening. It seems like we were having this same sort of conversation back 20, 25 years ago about the internet. And it sure, it did eliminate encyclopedia salesman jobs, but you know, largely people are still necessary in the loop. I mean, do you as the US somehow try to stop the development of this technology when elsewhere
26:32 Speaker 04 there are technology companies, smart people who are going to continue working on it?
26:36 Speaker 05 Well, I think you need a smart approach to regulation. Unfortunately, we have now is an effort to ban all regulation because these guys have captured the White House with Trump, you know? So I think that it's hard to distinguish between the hype of AGI and the very real harms of AI, which will come in a more simple form, the bias we already see coming out of these companies and their algorithms and the way it'll be used to exacerbate existing deficiencies in our society. I think the bigger problem is that we're learning that if you give people too much money, they go kind of crazy. And some of them go crazy and decide they want to end democracy and overthrow the United States of America and live in some dystopian science fiction fantasy world.
27:20 Speaker 05 And when you have that much money, you don't just talk about it, you take steps to make it happen. And how we deal with that problem is a very serious question that I don't think anybody in politics, Democrat or Republican wants to answer because they're so dependent on these people for campaign contributions. We need someone like an FDR to be a traitor to his class and rise up and find a way to put these billionaires back in their place.
27:48 Speaker 04 Well, back to the, the FDR idea here, what if?
27:54 Speaker 04 This is part of the natural rhythm of American climate. That when things go too extreme in one direction, you know, you had the robber barons and all of that, the roaring twenties. And there are extremes. There needs to be or ends up being some sort of consolidation of power on the other side that swings the pendulum back. Not that those ideas are right. Not that everything FDR did was completely sustainable or the way that he framed it. But what if it was just necessary because of the excesses of the rich that had built up on that side? And now what these guys and their crazy ideas represent is merely a pendulum swing in the other direction.
28:37 Speaker 05 I think that's plausible. I think studying these guys, one thing that I find frightening is that they have studied those periods of history. They understand what happened in the Gilded Age. You know, they, Balaschichtrina Vassen, name checks Ida Tarbell as a major enemy. He's still mad about what she did to Standard Oil. And it's, she's been dead since 1944. And so I think they're looking for a way to end the game. And they have enough wealth accruing now where we have robber barons who are richer than maybe at any other point in history, all these guys with infinite money. And now they're creating their own forms of money. So I think they're looking for a way to end the game.
29:20 Speaker 05 And that's why they're teamed up with MAGA. Because here is a president who is willing to sell to the highest bidder and who's completely testing the law, the constitution and the limitations on executive power. And I have no doubt that if Donald Trump tomorrow declared himself the permanent leader of the United States and said democracy is over, that we would have.
29:45 Speaker 05 Applause and silence from almost all of Silicon Valley.
29:50 Speaker 04 That's a different look than Silicon Valley elite executives displayed 25 years ago when you and I were pretty fresh out of school and heading over there. I mean, so is this what we're seeing, kind of the expansion of Atherton? For people who aren't familiar with the Bay Area, Atherton is sort of outside of Palo Alto. A lot of CEOs and venture capitalists live there, and it's the weirdest place in the Bay Area I ever went because you go and there are these streets and like hedges that are 15 feet tall. You can barely see any houses. In certain, some
30:33 Speaker 04 areas, you can't see any houses at all because that's the idea. You're not supposed to see anybody's house. But, you know, super rich people live there and if they invite you and they open the gate, you know, behind the hedges, you can go in and have an experience. But they have, you know, they're sending their kids to private schools. They're in these houses that you can't see. They're living very wealthy lives and mostly on the streets you see pickup trucks from people who are coming to service the properties. That idea seems to have expanded in recent years, even beyond Atherton, where, you know, pre 25 years ago, and not to lionize this guy, but Steve Jobs was living in Palo Alto, sending his kids to public school, and
31:14 Speaker 04 local families trick or treated at his house. It's very different from the Atherton mindset that seems to have expanded lately, no?
31:22 Speaker 05 Definitely. I think we've had a series of crises in our society that have radicalized some of these guys, as has the tremendous expansion of wealth through things like crypto in recent years. Plus, we've had social media hit. So you had the financial crisis in 08, which showed people that everything's much shakier than we thought. We had the rise of social media and a social media president, Donald Trump, who completely disrupted politics. We had the Me Too movement, which led to a lot more public awareness and sensitivity around certain structures of oppression, and that pissed off a lot of people who felt pretty powerful and rich and without problems before that. And then we had the pandemic, which completely made us all work together for a while and created some divisions over
32:06 Speaker 05 things like vaccines and public health safety measures. So I think we've lived through a period where Our tech CEOs and billionaires no longer feel comfortable just being a part of the system and trying to find a way to work within it. They've decided that everything is ripe for disruption, including the United States of America, including liberal democracy, and that it is their destiny to overthrow it or change it and create a system that answers to them. And so I think that's what the problem is. I do remember that 20 years ago, living in San Francisco, some people who'd been there a while really were disdainful of the techies and saw them as a threat, as this thing that
32:47 Speaker 05 was gonna bring bad ideas and change to town. And I thought they were exaggerating. I didn't think it was that bad. It turns out, actually, it kind of is that bad.
32:58 Speaker 04 Interesting. Let's, let's visit that for a moment because the, the national popular image of San Francisco is a place where needles are being passed out and homeless encampments are spreading throughout the city and there's little attention to the actual mechanics of day-to-day life. At the same time, the way I've experienced San Francisco over the past 20-plus years is there's been this enormous investment in office space and in the downtown to the exclusion of livability of actual individuals, families, to the point where when the pandemic hit and companies shut down, went to work from home, San Francisco became kind of a
33:43 Speaker 04 ghost town because there had been so much emphasis placed on office space versus people actually living there. What, what do you think is the, the truth of what San Francisco is now, what it has become and, and who it's serving?
34:00 Speaker 05 Well, San Francisco is the best and most beautiful city in the United States. I mean, it's an amazing place. There's all kinds of things happening and, you know, there are areas of town that are bad. I don't know if a lot of people, if you didn't grow up in the United States, you may not know that there's always a bad part of town in this country because there's poor people. And you tend to put them all in one neighborhood. I grew up in a poor neighborhood, so I know. If you go to my hometown, Tulare, there's a nice part where people have swimming pools and big lawns. And there's the part I'm from, which is, you know, not a place you want to go hanging around at night. So that's normal. This is a few blocks in San Francisco where the homelessness and the... Open drug addiction have gotten out of hand. And that's a problem that needs to be dealt with. Hopefully in a rational, evidence-based way.
34:45 Speaker 05 But what's happened is that there's been this sort of fox-driven slander campaign to make it seem like that's all of San Francisco. When you can walk three blocks from the epicenter of this zone and get like a $20 Japanese-style cocktail, right? So it's really the haves and the have-nots. It's a tale of two cities. And most of the city is expensive, beautiful, wonderful, glorious, full of culture and food, etc. So that, that part of the story is very fictional. But people have been priced out. And that's a story all across California and all across many parts of the nations, of the nation. Wages aren't keeping up in a way that allow people to continue to live in this country.
35:27 Speaker 05 A recent study showed that 60% of Americans have trouble making ends meet and affording the basics. That's the problem we gotta solve. So these tech billionaires always wanna screech about a few blocks in San Francisco where there's fentanyl addiction. Well, guess what's fueling the fentanyl trade more than anything? Crypto. So let's ban crypto as a first step toward solving the drug crisis. But they don't wanna do that. So they really are good at directing attention at a scapegoat and away from the core problem, which is that we have an increasing number of billionaires and an increasing number of people living in tents. And a society that is so vastly unequal that it is headed toward a collapse one way or another. But that'll just mean a reckoning.
36:11 Speaker 05 And I think it's gonna be a reckoning with the role that these billionaires play in our society and with the role that tech and Silicon Valley play in our society. Downtown San Francisco is empty because of Zoom, because you can work from home now. I worked in the financial district for 10 years and that's not where you see homelessness and drug addiction. There's a few homeless people, but that's about a mile away. The problem in downtown is that people can work from home now. And so all the restaurants that were there for years serving lunch, gone. And the offices are empty and it's dead. But if you go to the neighborhoods where people are now working, where they live, the everything's booming because that's where things have moved to. So we've seen this migration out of office space.
36:53 Speaker 05 It turns out we didn't need it because technology disrupted it. And people would rather not go to the office every day. But you find a way to, the stories make it seem like the reason downtown is empty is because of the homeless people. And that's a completely fabricated disinformation propaganda narrative, right? Those are two separate problems within a few miles of each other. But the way they get conflated by many in Silicon Valley and by Fox and Newsmax, et cetera, and by the President of the United States gives people a false impression of what's happening.
37:24 Speaker 04 So we might just be in this transition period. Going back to this idea of climate versus weather, where the cities were designed for a 1980s, 1990s reality in how people go throughout their day, work, play, live. But some of the fundamental mechanics of that have changed because of the technology that we have and people are going to work, play, live differently. And that means we've got a bunch of infrastructure sitting in various places that just isn't as necessary as it used to be. And then, you know, you end up with problems when you've got setups like that, no?
38:00 Speaker 05 Definitely. It's, you know, for thousands and thousands of years, human beings have figured out a way to shelter themselves. It's amazing that we can't figure out a way to provide shelter for the people we have here. You know, part of the problem in downtown San Francisco is that it's not so easy to convert all of these office buildings into housing. So it would be expensive to have to tear them down or convert them or completely reconfigure them. And there are some buildings that, office buildings that are being reconfigured into housing. But of course, that's probably going to be housing not for poor people, but for wealthier people who can afford to live in a redone old office building. So I do think we're, we're at a point where we have to figure out with all the technologies we have and all of the
38:40 Speaker 05 Future that we see right in our face, why can't we solve the basic old problems? And unfortunately, there's a political disconnect there where the people who want to say they who say they want to solve these problems only want to solve them in a certain way. Right? And then there's the political disagreement. For instance, there's this book Abundance that came out that everybody's fighting about all the time. Oh, sure. Abundance. It sounds great. It's a good word. We should have abundance. When you get down into details, though, there's no rational policy you can propose where everybody's just going to agree because it's rational. Politics is not based on rationality. It's based on all of these other factors, emotion, identity, morality. And so even if we had housing for everybody, someone would object
39:24 Speaker 05 because you have to work to get into the house. Actually, here in San Francisco, there's been a movement to keep people from getting housing if they don't stop doing drugs first. Well, the evidence and the data show that you want to get people into the housing and not create more barriers and then try to get them off of the drugs. But some people have a moral block against allowing people to get something while they're doing drugs. It's completely unscientific. The data proves it conclusively that it's wrong. But all these tech CEOs here are pro, you know, you have to get the treatment or you don't get the housing.
40:00 Speaker 04 What if you couldn't get government contracts if you were on drugs? That would be, that would be interesting.
40:05 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah. Well, the rules only apply to some people. Drug tests are for the little people.
40:12 Speaker 04 Um, are we in a situation where technology and democracy are fundamentally at odds? Are we in a cotton gin moment in a way? Because every new technology, somebody tries to frame it like this is the solution to inequality, right? The digital divide, we're going to solve that. We didn't solve the digital divide, right? As we saw during COVID, kids who had means and were home from school actually tended to do better in isolation, right? Kids who were in even really high-powered charter school type programs like KIP.
40:56 Speaker 04 Did far worse and it sort of debunked the argument that these charter school programs like KIP are cherry picking the most promising kids out of the inner city and the reason why they do well is because they would have done well anyway because a lot of those kids really had a lot of trouble when they were disconnected from that structured environment, intense attention from teachers, academic preparedness, et cetera, et cetera. But it's happening again now with AI and so I really wonder if we're in this march of technological progress, but technology and democracy fairness, economic opportunity are fundamentally at odds, is there any way to shift that equation that you see?
41:37 Speaker 05 Well, social justice and economic justice would be considered woke now by this new generation of CEOs, right? And they think they just defeated all of those ideas and now we can go into a meritocracy future where you only get things if you can compete at a very high level according to rules created by these Silicon Valley guys. I think that a big part of the problem is who is creating this technology and who are they creating it for? When I don't necessarily buy the hype on AGI and AI, but the CEOs are pushing this idea that they're about to massively transform and disrupt the world in a way that sounds like it's going to harm maybe the majority of people to benefit a small
42:22 Speaker 05 number of people. Why is that the case? Why are they designing it in that way? Why aren't they trying to find ways to create technologies that can solve the problems we have rather than create new worse problems? So I think a fundamental problem is that these technologies are now being designed by people in the private sector with nothing more than a profit motive. Whereas in the past, some of the biggest, most transformative technologies we have came out of government for the public good, for national security, for some other incentive, trying to solve the problem in a different way. And so I don't know how you can fix
43:02 Speaker 05 that problem as long as we're going to let a handful of extremely wealthy megalomaniacs guide. The progress.
43:12 Speaker 04 But you don't think that the mindset of this handful of people who you've highlighted as being part of the the nerd Reich idea is the dominant mindset in Silicon Valley. There seems to be a range. I talked to a lot of people in the valley, a lot of CEOs, founders, and very few of them seem to be strongly aligned with this libertarian, objectivist group. Some are sort of like, oh, this will pass. I kind of didn't like the Biden policies, and so maybe this is a bit better. Some are actively anti the direction that this administration,
43:54 Speaker 04 this government is going, but hey, they got a business to run, so they're trying to keep their heads down. Isn't there the idea that some of these people actually could could do or try or support something different?
44:06 Speaker 05 Well, it depends on who wins. Silence is complicity. And people sometimes get mad because I say, they say, don't say all tech, don't say all Silicon Valley. Well, where are all the techies and Silicon Valley CEOs speaking out against this stuff? Where are the people standing up and say, you know what, I'm going to put my money against this. This is morally wrong. This is repugnant. We should do it another way. Silicon Valley per capita, I think, has the highest collection of cowardly CEOs in the world. They all want to hide under a rock and be on whatever side wins. And that's what I see. I don't see one, really, speaking out.
44:44 Speaker 04 That's a frequent criticism in this administration of the likes of Jeff Bezos and that Washington, owner of the Washington Post, and that Washington Post slogan, democracy dies in darkness. Now, it's, I wonder, is that a prophecy? Or was it a warning? Was it a prediction? He seems to have taken a different slant on trying to not be in direct opposition to the Trump administration, no?
45:14 Speaker 05 Well, definitely. He wants to keep all of his government contracts. And, you know, he's gutted the editorial board that would have been a big voice in a time like this, right? Speaking as a conscience of the nation. And he has some childish idea that he can just be for freedom and economic markets without those meaning things that are political. You know, he, I think Bezos is totally going for self-interest. And like I said, I think if Trump declared that democracy was over, you wouldn't hear a peep from the Washington Post or from Jeff Bezos. You know, they just want to be on the side that's winning, to steal a phrase from Bob Dylan. And that, to me, is part of the most scary thing about it all. Growing up in this country, and I grew up in a very conservative place, I think when
45:58 Speaker 05 I was really young, I sort of had some Republican leanings just because of what I was surrounded by. And it was a very patriotic town, and a lot of people in my family enlisted in the military for no particular reason. And it was considered a thing to do. You serve your country. And it's amazing to grow up and to realize, you know, as I head toward 50, that so many people just don't believe in anything and don't believe in this country and don't really care what happens to it as long as they get theirs. And that is just not the way I ever thought it would be. That's been a bit of a surprise to me. And if you can't have a little bit of courage when you have billions and billions of dollars, I think, you know, the value of that money is suspect. And I think it's going to take millions of Americans who are not billionaires to save
46:43 Speaker 05 this country. And then we're going to have a lot of questions for all these rich people who sat around just watching it burn.
46:52 Speaker 04 We need to take another quick break. We'll be right back.
47:03 Speaker 01 Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard? But not the pipeline? That's bullspend, and marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.
47:12 Speaker 02 My boss asked for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had: impressions.
47:20 Speaker 01 Cut the bullspend. See revenue, not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.
47:33 Speaker 03 College football is back. So Hilton called and me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.
48:04 Speaker 06 This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability varies 18+.
48:32 Speaker 04 We're back with the Nerd Rank author Gil Duran, talking about the collapse of trust in institutions like the media that may have created a vacuum for anti-democracy ideas to flourish. As you're talking, and we've talked about the collapse or weakening of many institutions, you've worked for big media companies, you've worked for California politicians, and now you're independent. So in a way, perhaps, the disillusionment with institutions and their ability to execute on truth or moving the needle, maybe you're living that out now, no?
49:10 Speaker 05 Well, I'd say it's more a situation where billionaires in technology have killed journalism jobs. Oh, I would have definitely been at a publication if there had been one. It was a hard struggle last year to find a way to make ends meet and still write the stories I wrote for The New Republic. I don't know if people know what freelance pays these days, but I wrote five major stories and it got me about a month's worth of rent in San Francisco. So you don't make your money off of the writing. You write on the side and you find other ways to survive. And I think that we were talking earlier about technology taking jobs. Do you remember the Mercury News in 1998 compared to now? I do. So there was a bit of a decimation.
49:49 Speaker 05 So, you know, I would, I think the bigger problem, there's the economics of it, where any place you go, I was at the Bee, I was at the Examiner, it's just layoffs all the time. It gets a bit depressing. And then the rules get tighter and tighter and there's just constant panic and trying to remake whatever the publication is to meet some target that some new person has because the last person failed. And, you know, I was actually going to leave journalism, but I found this story and I felt like I gotta tell this story. Maybe that's the last story I'll tell as a journalist, so I did it. But fortunately, I mean, there are positive parts of technology. It doesn't all have to be controlled by a handful of fascists, right? And we deserve technology as well. We deserve technology that doesn't come with the threat of losing our freedom, of losing
50:34 Speaker 05 our identity, of losing our way of life. And ironically, technology has created this system now where I can have direct subscribers and do my work and reach people on podcasts, on YouTube, et cetera. So we're all sort of in this soup. And my argument is not that technology is bad. I'm an early adopter of everything. I just got a new e-bike. It's that we don't have to live under the boot of these people because they're at some company that creates something. There should be more of a public ownership of some of these things as well.
51:07 Speaker 04 Unpack some of that because as you said, you are not a Luddite. In fact, you are embracing lots of technology in how you're distributing this Nerd Reich message, newsletter, podcasts, you're using some AI in how the message is formulated and distributed. Tell me about that.
51:30 Speaker 05 Well, I forbade that on the podcast. We're using Adobe now, using, I use Shutterstock. I prefer real human images. There was a moment early on when I used a bit of OpenAI, the image generation, it was like a new toy, right? And I use it actually to depict the future that some of these guys won. Actually Balaji Srinivasan had talked about this great pride parade where all the techies would wear gray uniforms and march down Market Street in San Francisco with police and drones flying overhead. So I literally plugged in his phrase into OpenAI, into Dali, and it created this terrifying horrific image, actually kind of like Trump's parade over the weekend. But the more I have had conversations with
52:11 Speaker 05 people and talked about this stuff, the more uncomfortable I've become with using those tools. And I think we're seeing right now this phase of an AI art aesthetic that's going to look really bad in a few years, right? Especially when you think about the amount of theft and robbery taking place to create these little toys and the idea that it, you know, boils a swimming pool or something in order to generate it. So I have made it clear that I don't want AI in my images. Use a Shutterstock. I think most people who are looking for the words anyway. And I'm actually, I've got a Nerd Reich art project underway and I'm going to work with a real artist on it, even though people are like, just use AI, you know? I don't think we can get to a point where we just use AI as long
52:56 Speaker 05 as it's going to enrich these guys. That's the same reason I'm not on Substack. I started on Substack, but a lot of my readers were like, how can you be on Substack? It's Andreessen Horowitz are one of the main investors in this. And you know, at first I was hesitant and Substack made it really easy to start a newsletter and monetize it. But there are alternatives. There's a nonprofit I use now, Ghost. And in fact, they take a smaller percentage of your Of your pay and I've had bigger growth on it because it really does depend on your content. You're not going to become a, a big Substack writer with a crappy blog. Right? If you're a good writer, you can take it elsewhere. So, you know, I think we all have to navigate these relationships. There's no way to be perfect. Just like, you know, we use fossil fuels. We eat products that might be harvested under unethical conditions,
53:41 Speaker 05 but we have to strive to be more conscious of our relationships with these technologies and to do better if we can.
53:47 Speaker 04 Sounds like farm to table technology. So, okay, there are boundaries around what you're willing to do. You axed out the AI stuff. That's kind of like being like, okay, I'm not going to import that meat from that far away and, and burn all those fossil fuels. You're still using, you're still podcasting. You're still using the internet, right? It's, it's technology. What are you finding about the feedback that you're getting? What's driving the, the growth and the engagement on the platforms where people are hearing your thesis and the guests who you're speaking with?
54:19 Speaker 05 I think people have been looking for a way to make sense of what's happening. And this has been a missing piece of the puzzle.
54:26 Speaker 05 Right? What's happening with Silicon Valley, its rightward turn, its mating up with MAGA, and these weird ideas that we see coming out like the Freedom City, taking Greenland and giving it to Praxis, which is a company funded by Sam Altman and Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen. People wonder, why is all this happening? And no one's been telling a cohesive narrative in the mainstream press about why it's happening. And that's very much been my focus. And look, last year, I think to a lot of people, this seemed like conspiratorial stuff. Or like you said earlier, it seemed weird. Well, we live in weird times and we got some conspiratorial people on the scene. And I think that the press is finally starting to catch up to what I was trying to say last year. And look, if Kamala Harris had won,
55:10 Speaker 05 it would look like I had gone down a very strange rabbit hole and it wouldn't have been clear why. Because this stuff would have been pushed back a few years. I think it still would have been relevant. But it would have been pushed back. But even I didn't expect it to accelerate this quickly. I didn't think it'd be Elon Musk in the White House doing Curtis Yarvin's retire all government employees plan. You know, I didn't think that Trump would be pushing already to build these freedom cities and take Greenland for the purpose of doing that. This has gone much faster and much further than I expected so far. And now we've got people like Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong openly talking about Bitcoin replacing the dollar as a global reserve currency, which is another thing I've been talking about for a couple of years, right?
55:55 Speaker 05 Which would have some dramatic effects on this country and its standing in the world. So unfortunately, this stuff ended up being a lot more important than it should have been. And I will, I hope journalists at the big papers and publications with massive followings will start to tune in and tell people because what I have found is that people really want to know. And once you explain it to them, they understand it, they have the tools to understand what's happening. And our democracy information is necessary for citizens to make the right decisions. And I don't see why people are censoring an important part of this story. And I spent my life as a journalist at establishment newspapers, working for establishment politicians.
56:40 Speaker 05 You know, I'm a pretty solid evidence-based guy. And I think that this generation of political editors at papers like the Washington Post and the New York Times should be known as the generation of failure for completely missing this story. And the fact that they're racing to do it now proves the point.
56:59 Speaker 04 Well, let's close on a hopeful note then. Paint for me, get out your greens and yellows perhaps. Paint for me the picture of how America, how society, maybe even how tech works its way out of this situation. You alluded earlier to the non-billionaires rising up and pursuing a different end. How might that happen? What does it take?
57:26 Speaker 05 Well, I think that this is going to take millions of people in the street on a regular basis. We have to get through the current crisis, right? And these tech oligarchs have to see that they're playing a very dangerous game by cozying up to Trump and facilitating his fantasies of an authoritarian transformation of this country. Over time, though, I think we have to reckon with the fact that these people have enough money to be an ongoing threat and to try this again. And so I think it's going to take an awareness of the role that billionaires play in our society and a political movement to demand leaders who are willing to address that problem.
58:05 Speaker 04 What kind of leaders? During the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement rose up, and there was this move toward, I'm not going to say exactly leaderless, but decentralized approaches to movements. And if, I haven't tested this out, so, you know, poke holes in it, if you will. But the Republican Party, the right, has become more centralized in Donald Trump than at any time, I would argue, in our lifetimes. Even those who don't agree with large portions, Republicans who don't agree with large portions of what he said,
58:45 Speaker 04 many of them are falling in line, and it's led to this early ability of the Trump administration to make massive progress. So if you're painting a picture of how things might swing the other way, is decentralization the answer, or does there need to be the rise of a different kind of charismatic figure, dangerous as those might be, to help people believe?
59:08 Speaker 05 I don't think it has to be one charismatic figure. I think it has to be a movement that speaks to the real needs of people. Like I said earlier, 60% of Americans can't afford the basics. If the Democratic Party can't find a way to make use of that, well, then I guess it's lights out. You know, and you've got AOC and Bernie Sanders going around drawing tens of thousands of people in traditionally conservative areas, right? People are looking for leaders who speak to their basic core values and issues. And the Democratic Party just wants to play a tag along with crypto. They want to be a lighter version of the Republican Party. And I think that way lies doom. And I think especially with these younger people coming up today, they are not in the
59:53 Speaker 05 mood, especially after the next four years, for some half baked, mealy mouthed political party that tells them that the status quo is also the future. So one way or another, we're going to get sold a vision of that future. And it's going to be this fascist tech dystopia, or it's going to be something that serves the majority of people and preserves the ideas of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. And again, if the Democratic Party can't find a way to message that, then someone else will come along and do it for them.
1:00:24 Speaker 04 Like who?
1:00:25 Speaker 05 Oh, I don't know. I don't think the leader has yet appeared, but people like AOC, Bernie Sanders, Mamdani in New York seem to be tapping into something very powerful. And if the Democrats aren't going to do it, then someone else will.
1:00:41 Speaker 04 All right. Gil Duran. The podcast and newsletter is The Nerd Reich. The book, also called The Nerd Reich?
1:00:49 Speaker 05 The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Global Democracy.
1:00:53 Speaker 04 Now, we're early, but you're writing it. How far out should people look for this to perhaps appear? Well, definitely, but how far out should people look for it to appear on shelves?
1:01:03 Speaker 05 Oh, 2026. But if you want to keep up with the progress, it's thenerdreich.com and it's free.
1:01:10 Speaker 04 Oh, there's like a progress bar going across?
1:01:12 Speaker 05 Well, I'm giving people some updates and you can kind of see where I'm going with stuff, you know?
1:01:18 Speaker 04 Gil, thank you. This has been Decoder.
1:01:20 Speaker 05 Thank you.
1:01:24 Speaker 04 I'd like to thank Gil Duran for taking the time to speak with me and thank you for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed it. You can find Gil's ongoing work over at thenerdreich.com. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this show or what else you'd like us to cover, drop us a line. You can email us at decoder@theverge, they really do read every email, or hit me up directly on X or LinkedIn. I'm at John Fort on all platforms. Decoder also has a TikTok and Instagram. Check those out at DecoderPod. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media
1:02:05 Speaker 04 Podcast Network. Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Stapp. The show is edited by Ursula Wright. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. See you next time.
1:02:25 Speaker 07 This week, it pays extra to be a MyLowe's Rewards member. Through October 14, members get $10 MyLowe's money when you spend $200 or more on an eligible purchase during MyLowe's Money Days. Also using your MyLowe's Rewards credit card? Even better, that's an additional $20 MyLowe's money. Use it to save on your next Lowe's haul. Exclusions, restrictions, and more terms apply. See Lowe's.com/MyLowe'sMoneyDays for details. MyLowe's money expires 30 days after issuance. Subject to change. Credit offer subject to credit approval.
1:02:54 Speaker 08 Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing and wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash Apple Watch Series 12.
1:03:24 Speaker 09 We just moved into our new house and I didn't realize just how close we were to the neighbors. That's when my friend told me about Blinds.com.
1:03:32 Speaker 10 Blinds.com isn't a medication, but it can improve how you feel about your home. Customers who shop at Blinds.com experience excellent customer service, from consultation to installation. Side effects include increased privacy and better sleep. Talk to your partner today and see if Blinds.com is right for you.
1:03:49 Speaker 02 Visit Blinds.com now to save up to 50% off sitewide during our annual fall blowout sale.
Previous Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app Next We are not ready for better deepfakes Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
