Gil Durán’s new book, The Nerd Reich, catalogs how tech oligarchs like Peter Thiel took over America.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Harun Ozalp/Anadolu via Getty Images, Florencia Tan Jun/Web Summit via Sportsfile via Getty Images and Marco Bello/Getty Images.
This completes the COMPLEAT Broadcast series. It will remain here on this Substack so you may revisit it or share it. If you’d like a print copy of the book section of this work, it is available through https://compleat.store
I hd fun doing this interview. As I said when I announced that I was doing this interview, after deciding at the beginning of this year I would no longer do interviews, this will be my last interview I do. I made an exception this time because AJ and I had emailed a few years ago; he brought up my doing an interview, and I agreed. The Why Files team was very gracious and accommodated my schedule, so here is the result. I hope you enjoy it. Interviews have lost their luster for me, and god knows, you have plenty of examples of me blathering on. I wish you all well. –JM
Joseph Matheny invented something in 1989 that nobody had a name for yet. He called it a story. The internet called it the first alternate reality game. The Navy called him to ask how he did it. He turned them down.
Tonight he’s in the basement explaining how he built an early AI, game-mastered Robert Anton Wilson at Esalen, and why QAnon looks so familiar to him.
Some things are better understood when you know how the trick works.
Tonight he’s in the basement explaining how he built an early AI, game-mastered Robert Anton Wilson at Esalen, and why QAnon looks so familiar to him.
Some things are better understood when you know how the trick works.
THE GRAB is a jaw-dropping global thriller combining hard-hitting journalism from The Center for Investigative Reporting with the compelling character-driven storytelling of director Gabriela Cowperthwaite (BLACKFISH), taking you around the globe from Arizona to Zambia, to reveal one of the world’s biggest and least known threats.
Scientists working on synthetic “mirror life” have come to realize that, if created, it could pose an existential threat to life on Earth.
Seasoned bioethicist Laurie Zoloth has a trick she likes to play in her seminars at the University of Chicago. She tells each student to pick up a pencil, then she gives them a series of instructions about how to maneuver it in their hands. At some point, nearly everyone drops the pencil. And that’s the point she’s trying to illuminate: “Humans always make errors,” Zoloth told me over Zoom. We drop things, we forget to switch things off, we lose our focus, we get tired. “Being human is like driving in a snowstorm, all the time,” she said, the hint of a smile emanating from beneath her round glasses.
The Los Angeles suspect was lonely and angry and felt “enslaved” by rich people, prosecutors say. After being romantically spurned, they say, he went into the mountains and lit a fire.
The Palisades fire killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of homes in the seaside Los Angeles neighborhood of Pacific Palisades in January 2025.Credit…Mark Abramson for The New York Times
on resisting authoritarianism and the flaws in contemporary realism
Our dreams are birds, they pluck fruit from high branches we cannot reach with our hands. They carry the fruit down to us, and we choose what to do with it. Some dreams are totally alien and need to be examined, while others are easier to digest. Some dreamers cannot recognize their fruits and toss them aside. Others examine them closely. Whatever kind of dreamer you are, these dreams are speaking to you. They hold meaning no matter how strange or insipid they seem. At some point in life, we all experience a dream so striking and bizarre that we are haunted by it into the next day, even if it was completely abstract and not a conscious fear. This is the essential language of dreams, and the font of surrealism’s power.
