Why Are Silicon Valley’s Utopians Prepping for Collapse?

Silicon Valley billionaires say tech will create a better future. So, why are many of them quietly preparing luxury doomsday bunkers?

Find out in the latest episode of The Nerd Reich podcast. I talk with journalists Guthrie Scrimgeour and Taylor Lorenz about why so many tech zillionaires want “apocalypse insurance” — a place to flee when everything collapses.

Hit play below to listen:

For Wired, Scrimgeour wrote about Mark Zuckerberg's plans to build a $300+ bunker mansion fortress on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai. You can find links to his story in the show notes on YouTube.

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Transcript: Zuckerberg’s Hawaii Compound: Burial Grounds, Doomsday Bunkers & NDAs

Transcripts are auto-generated, lightly edited for clarity, and may contain errors.

Gil Duran:Why is Mark Zuckerberg building a $300 million mansion fortress with underground shelters and blast-proof doors? The CEO of Meta, a company that promised to connect the world with Facebook and Instagram, is building what sounds a lot like a doomsday bunker on Kauai. It's a Hawaiian island fortress, complete with escape hatches, surveillance systems, and the capacity to house over 100 people. And he's buying land that contains burial grounds where local families have visited their ancestral graves for generations.

It sounds like dystopian fiction, but it's chillingly real. The same man who built a platform to connect humanity is now surrounding himself with impenetrable walls and non-disclosure agreements, so strict that construction workers get fired for posting on social media about the project. But let's be clear, this isn't about one billionaire's bunker. This is about what Silicon Valley calls all of these survival compounds: apocalypse insurance.

It's a window into the mind of doomsday prepper tech oligarchs. They spent decades telling us their technology will create utopia, all while seeming to prepare for civilizational collapse. They mined your data, broke your trust, and called it progress. Now they're retreating to their mountain head doomsday estates to watch it all burn from above. The irony would be laughable if it weren't so disturbing. I'm Gil Duran, and this is the Nerd Reich Podcast. To impact the tech bro prepper trend, we've got two guests with their own compound interests.

We're joined by Guthrie Scrimgeour. He's a freelance writer who broke the story of Zuckerberg's mega compound at Wired Magazine. And we're also joined by special guest Taylor Lorenz, who has been tracking Silicon Valley's culture and cult-like behavior for years. This is a story about how digital feudalism is going physical.

And the people building our dystopian future? They don't plan to live in it.

Here we go.

Gil Duran: Guthrie and Taylor, welcome to the Nerd Reich Podcast.

Guthrie: Yeah. Thank you for having me, Gil.

Taylor: Thanks for having me.

Gil Duran: Guthrie, you've uncovered what might be one of the most secretive and expensive private construction projects in modern history. Mark Zuckerberg building a compound in Hawaii that's over $300 million that could house over 100 people complete with underground bunkers and blast resistant doors. And you wrote this in your piece for Wired: “The plans show that the two central mansions will be joined by a tunnel that branches off into a 5,000 square foot underground shelter featuring living space, a mechanical room and escape hatch that can be accessed via a ladder.”

Walk us through what you discovered when you started investigating the strange mansion fortress that Mark Zuckerberg is building on Kauai.

Guthrie: Yeah, well, the first thing that stood out to me about this project from looking at the planning documents that I requested from the local planning department is just the scale of it. So like you said, it's over $300 million. I think that's a very conservative estimate. It covers an area that is the same size as three central parks. And that property includes dozens of guest houses, ranch operations buildings, opulent mansions. It has these weird saucer-shaped tree houses in the woods. Yeah, like you said, there is this strange kind of doomsday element to it where the two central mansions are joined by a tunnel which branches off into this very large storm shelter. When you combine that with the secrecy of the project, it does seem like there's definitely bunkery doomsday elements to the project.

Gil Duran: How did you first hear about the project? What put you on the trail of it?

Guthrie: Yeah, so I was working as a local journalist in Kauai and just from day to day reporting, I would meet a lot of people that did work on the project. And I came to realize that there were hundreds of local workers that had done some work on the Zuckerberg compound, and none of them were allowed to officially talk about it because they were all under these NDAs. And I came to realize these NDAs weren't just a formality, they were actually like very strictly enforced. And a few of the folks I talked to for this article had stories of other workers who had been fired from the job site because they had somehow violated these NDAs. So I became very fascinated with the idea of this secret compound that nobody's allowed to talk about. And I just wanted to figure out what was actually going on there.

Gil Duran:Yeah. And you wrote about people getting fired for posting on social media. Crews that are working on the project are forbidden from talking to other crew members about their work if they're working on a separate part of it. You've got the sort of separation of crews and one former contract employee told you that “it's a Fight Club. We don't talk about Fight Club,” right? So you're not allowed to talk about this secretive thing. Yet there are cameras everywhere, right? The project's under surveillance, the land is under surveillance, high level of security. And it sounds more like a classified military installation in some ways than someone's vacation home, which may be normal for a billionaire.

Taylor, there seems to be a clear double standard. Tech billionaires like Zuckerberg get to harvest our data and control our behavior and surveil us with AI and social media while building bunkers and surveillance fortresses to protect themselves. As someone who covers the tech industry culture, what does this level of secrecy tell us about how Zuckerberg and tech executives view privacy for themselves versus for their users?

Taylor: Well, it's all “privacy for me and not for thee.” And you see this over and over with these tech billionaires. It reminds me of when Elon Musk, you know, was censoring people and banning journalists, the New York Times, Washington Post and elsewhere for simply reporting on where his private jet was landing. This is public information. He censored an account that was called, I believe, Elon's jet, where it would track kind of where his private jet would come and go.

They don't care at all about privacy when it comes to the public. And in fact, they're increasingly focused on stripping privacy in order to extract more and more data from users. This is why they're on board with things like age verification and these other technologies that actually even allow them to harvest users' biometric data. But yeah, they don't want anybody to know about their secret compounds. They don't want anybody to know anything about their lives, their investments, their ideologies. Like that's all sort of secret.

Gil Duran: Guthrie, Taylor mentioned how Elon Musk went after journalists and banned them. It seems like Zuckerberg did a bit of that himself when this story about his compound started getting some attention. You mentioned a certain local journalist who was no longer welcome to cross the property at all.

Guthrie: Yeah, there was a local Kauai journalist who had written critically about Zuckerberg in the local newspaper. And as he tells it, he was told by Zuckerberg representatives that they would no longer communicate with him for future pieces. And he also worked for a marine nonprofit. So at one point, this journalist had to cross the Zuckerberg property to assist a seal as part of his work with this marine rescue organization. And after he left the property, he was informed by the Zuckerberg team that he had been banned from the property. He would no longer be allowed to ever enter under any circumstances, even if there was another seal in trouble.

Gil Duran: Your most recent story about how Zuckerberg is expanding his compound now has a pretty disturbing revelation. There's a burial ground on the site and he now owns the land where some Hawaiians' ancestors or family members are buried. Local families have been visiting their ancestors' graves there for a long time. And this sort of shows the degree to which this buying of so much land is having an impact on local culture and on the land itself.

Tell us how Native Hawaiian land rights have traditionally worked in this area and how has the family of Julian Ako, who you talked to for your story, whose grandmother is buried on the land, negotiated this situation where their relative, their ancestor is buried on land that is now owned by a tech billionaire?

Guthrie: When Zuckerberg first bought the land in 2014, there were a lot of Native Hawaiian descendants who had rights to certain parcels within the Zuckerberg property. And these are Kuleana rights, and they are passed down to Native Hawaiian descendants of original landowners. And there would have been hundreds of Kuleana descendants who, under Native Hawaiian law, had the right to cross Zuckerberg's property to access their land.

And what Zuckerberg did in 2016 is he filed these quiet title suits, which would have forced all of these Kuleana descendants to either sell their land to Zuckerberg right away, or to bid for it against him at auction. And there was a huge backlash when these suits became public, and Zuckerberg eventually dropped his role in them. But they did continue under one Kuleana descendant who Zuckerberg supported in an op-ed in the local newspaper. And the rumor among the other Kuleana descendants was that Zuckerberg was also backing this guy financially. Because when the plots of land did eventually go to auction, this guy was able to outbid all of the other Kuleana descendants. All of the land is now just owned by Zuckerberg or by parties who are favorable to Zuckerberg.

So this left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths, especially when you consider the history of wealthy people coming into Hawaii, buying up native land, and that generally not ending well. But so I spoke with this guy, Julian Ako, who grew up traveling to this land, and his, like you said, his great grandmother and her brother are actually buried on this land. And so he was able to, after negotiating with the Zuckerberg team for a while, he was able to access the property and officially register these burials with the state. But he had also been told that there were additional burials somewhere else on this property, and he wasn't able to locate those. And so he has this fear that because of the extreme secrecy on the project, because workers are all under NDAs, that if further burials are discovered, these workers would be incentivized to not report them.

Gil Duran: Taylor, a morally dubious billionaire builds his doomsday-ish bunker on a local burial ground. Kind of sounds like the start of a bad horror movie. And I was at dinner talking about Guthrie's story with a few friends and everybody brought up The Shining right away, because the hotel in The Shining is also built on burial grounds under also colonial circumstances. What do you make of Zuckerberg swallowing up so much land for this strange and colonial project?

Taylor: I just think it's so concerning that we have these billionaires that are able to purchase these massive parcels of land and essentially go into these communities and just sort of dominate them to the point that they control, you know, they have significant political influence through their money and power. And they can kind of just waltz in anywhere and buy up land that has significant cultural or historical value and also just sort of influence the community in these various ways. You know, like Guthrie said, these people are signed to incredibly restrictive NDAs and they're obviously their loyalty is going to be to Zuckerberg because he pays the bills.

And you see this happening a lot where you have rich people coming in and kind of changing the dynamics of the town. I'm thinking of actually Greenville, North Carolina as well, which I don't know if there are necessarily burial grounds there, but you have a big YouTuber like Mr. Beast, actually, not a tech billionaire, but still a maniacal rich guy who comes in and essentially turns all of Greenville into a company town. And, you know, when I wrote about Mr. Beast's labor violations and some of the bad stuff that he had done in Greenville, you're met with a huge amount of hostility from certain locals because now they sort of economically depend on the jobs of this rich person that came in and is sometimes paying a little bit higher wages again because they want that secrecy. They want that loyalty. And so it's sort of like warps the dynamic of these small towns, whether it's in somewhere like Hawaii, which also has like a really fucked up, really messed up colonial past or just somewhere like Greenville, North Carolina, which was previously just sort of like a small college town and now you have the biggest YouTuber on the planet coming in and becoming the number one employer.

Gil Duran: Let's get to the doomsday question here. When a billionaire like Zuckerberg pieces together underground shelters and these self-sufficient systems with the capacity for a lot of people and extreme security measures, it looks less like a family retreat and more like a preparation for civilizational collapse. This has become very popular in Silicon Valley in the past decade and I believe some people refer to it as quote “apocalypse insurance.” It's sort of a status symbol. Even if you're not thinking the world's about to end, you got to have a compound, a bunker somewhere, maybe a helicopter, some motorcycles, some guns.

A few years ago, LinkedIn founder, Reid Hoffman told Evan Osnos of the New Yorker that approximately 50% of his Silicon Valley peers have invested in some kind of doomsday bunker preparation kit. Peter Thiel famously bought a hideout in New Zealand. And Sam Altman told the New Yorker that, quote, “I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.” In fact, Altman has said that the founders who do the very best are very paranoid, full of existential crises. You've also got Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, the list goes on of people who think we have to escape the planet, escape society.

Taylor, given your coverage of tech and tech culture, what do you make of this survivalist doomsday mindset among tech executives in general? What does it tell us about how they view the future?

Taylor: I think it's so crazy that these tech executives that spend all day sort of selling the public on their own dystopian versions of the future and saying, “actually, it's going to be so amazing. Everyone's going to have smart glasses. Drones will surveil us. It's going to be wonderful.” But at the same time are trying to opt out of all of it through building these like sort of pastoral bunkers often in incredibly remote locations away from technology in the modern world.

So I think it's, you know, it also just shows that they don't have a lot of faith in their own visions because again, if we were going to have this techno utopian future that all of these tech billionaires are selling us, why on earth would they need to opt out? Why on earth would they need to have all these contingency plans? I think they actually do recognize the great existential problems that are facing humanity right now, like climate change, like COVID, you know, all of these other significant problems that are dooming humanity in the near and far future. But they'd rather just sort of personally opt out of it than actually use their technology or use their money to combat any of it.

Gil: Yeah, they call themselves techno optimists, but they seem to be techno pessimists when they're in their private life..

Taylor: They're techno-doomers. Techno-doomerists.

Gil: Guthrie, you spoke to Douglas Rushkoff, who's written about the billionaire prepper mentality. Tell us about the concept called “The Mindset" and how it works.

Guthrie: Yeah, so as he describes it, the mindset is this idea of billionaires trying to accumulate enough money that they're able to escape the real-world problems that they create, whether that's by building bunkers that they can hide in if the world ends, going in a rocket ship off to Mars. What Douglas Rushkoff said when I interviewed him for the Zuckerberg piece was, if anybody has enough money to do this, it would be Zuck. And where you have doomsday visions, you typically have cults.

Gil: And Guthrie, you've chronicled the new religious sect control of a town in the Midwest for Rolling Stone, I believe it was. Taylor, you've covered some cult-like fandoms online. We recently did a whole episode about the new cult of effective altruism as an outgrowth of Silicon Valley culture. It struck me how many parallels we're seeing between modern-day tech-bro thinking or tech thinking in general and the original Bay Area social disruptor, Jim Jones.

In fact, I wrote a whole column about how a lot of this back to the land, get your own compound, the end is coming soon, got to get your network society together and move is something we've already seen in the past. It didn't take tech to invent that. We've seen this recurring sort of cult-like movement based around the ideas of doom for thousands of years. I guess the question I'm trying to get at is: are digital para-social bonds starting to mirror old school cult dynamics? Is it just sped up and made easier by technology? Taylor, we'll start with you.

Taylor: Yeah, I think just the public generally right now is very susceptible to cult like thinking because we have an economic system of capitalism that is completely breaking and failing us in every meaningful way. We have, you know, these tech companies sort of pushing people further and further into isolationist lifestyles where you live alone in your box, you go to work every day for nine hours, you eat your slop at the end of the day from DoorDash, then you go to sleep and work all over again. It's often you're working for an app, you know.

So I think that like our modern society is so lonely and everybody is so lonely that they are looking for salvation and community anywhere they can find it. And they're increasingly finding that community through these like, yeah, these weird like techno spiritual cults or parasocial cults around certain influencers online. But overall, there's just this move into like techno-spiritualism and mysticism because people view technology as this like savior that might come save us all.

I made a video recently about people believing that ChatGPT is God, which is actually a pretty pervasive problem where you have thousands of people that are now believing this, believing that artificial intelligence is some sort of God that will come rescue us and deliver salvation from this capitalist hellscape that we live in. But really, that's not going to happen. And the billionaire that is in charge of ChatGPT is just getting richer and richer to build his own bunker that apparently has ammunition and iodide tablets and gold.

Gil Duran: Gold. We'll have to talk about gold at some point and the fixation on gold. Guthrie, what are the connections you see between this digital landscape and this movement to seize territory and form one's own private society or at least one's own private fortress?

Guthrie: Well, I think the obvious parallel between cult leaders and tech CEOs is Elon. Earlier this year, I went down to South Texas to investigate Elon's company town that he's building there outside of Brownsville on the Mexican border. And the first thing that you notice when you go down there is an Elon stan has constructed this like nine foot tall golden statue of Elon, which I think is maybe partly ironic, but partly not ironic. And there is just this like weird culture of fanboy obsession with Elon that has actually drawn a lot of people to the region.

And when you look at the company town itself, Starbase, which just voted to incorporate recently, the vibe there is not too dissimilar from a cult, because there's this culture of secrecy. There's this idea that you're not allowed to say anything bad about the company or about the leader because you're worried that that will get you fired. And so, that really seemed very similar to the cult that I covered in rural Illinois, where there's this culture of, you're not allowed to talk badly about the supreme leader. You know, you can't speak out of school, we're only allowed to talk to each other about these things. So yeah, there's definitely a culty vibe to that company town that I covered.

Gil Duran: And they're popping up more and more. There was a story recently about another one in Tennessee, a sort of religious sect trying to build its own compound about an hour outside of Nashville with backers like Mark Andreessen and others who kind of pop up in the middle of these so-called network state schemes. So the tech bros have their own version of it. But it's something that already exists back in the 90s. There was Branch Davidians. You know, you had the Manson family and Spahn Ranch. It's not really a new thing, but there is this new spin being put on it.

It's amazing that here we are in the 21st century with all of these tools and technologies and so much more science. But if you were to go back 1500 years, you would find people with very much the same belief system and behavior. The end is coming. We have to form a society. We have to find our promised land. We have to get away from everybody else. And it's interesting too, you know, we have these CEOs like Zuckerberg, who's the CEO of a platform that was supposed to connect us, connect the world and break down walls and barriers. And now he's trying to put them up.

And that naturally leads to questions about what kind of digital apartheid society some of these guys are planning to build for the future. And in addition to preparing for doom, many of them are preparing for things like the fall of the US dollar and the government. This was back in 2017, there was this expressed fear in this New Yorker profile about Silicon Valley doomers. These people have a lack of faith in the country. They feel like everything could fall apart at any minute. And yet some of them also seem to be trying to make that happen.

The web, the internet was supposed to free us and connect us. But it seems like these billionaires who've been created by it are more about putting up castle walls or preparing for life underground or on other planets. Is this just a problem with massive wealth? How should we interpret this contradiction between the idea of connecting everybody but also seeking separation? Taylor, you want to take that one?

Taylor: I think that these billionaires don't want to be among the masses. I think they view themselves as fundamentally even potentially genetically superior to other people. I think that, you know, they talk about often, especially Elon, others as like NPCs, you know, or normies. Like there's, it's sort of considered that like there's the tech billionaire class and then there's the plebes below them and you don't have to sort of associate or socialize or, you know, build your home around those people.

And so I think they sort of end up in these very isolated bubbles where they're really is just surrounded by other billionaires and yes men and kind of hangers on. And they're never actually engaging with the broader public or the real world. And I think it allows them to really dehumanize the public and the users of their very own platforms where they just don't view the public as sort of equal people, equal people with equal agency. And I think that that's disturbing. It shows this like deep narcissism that a lot of these billionaires have and this sort of egomania.

Gil Duran: Every Mountaintop compound is a confession. These guys don't believe in society. They just want surveillance stockpiles and escape plans. Guthrie, what does Zuckerberg's Hawaiian fortress tell us about how extreme wealth is reshaping not only our digital world, but our actual geography and indigenous communities?

Guthrie: Yeah. Well, one thing I think is really interesting about the Zuckerberg compound is just the way that his charitable donations to the community have really reshaped the community. Zuckerberg's total spending on that compound is now, like I said, more than 300 million, which is more than the operating budget for the local government in Kauai for last fiscal year. So that amount of wealth and that change to a community is just going to absolutely distort the way that local democracy looks in that community.

And so now what you often see there is instead of seeking funding for an initiative from the government, as you would do normally, nonprofits are going like hat in hand to Zuckerberg. You know, it has had a lot of positive impacts that Zuckerberg has been able to give money to local nonprofits that wouldn't have otherwise had that money. But it is all kind of very feudal, right? Where people just have to go hat in hand and keep their fingers crossed that Zuckerberg will like them enough to give them money, instead of that going through a democratic process, like, as you might hope, that sorts of decisions would go through.

Gil: The concept of feudalism does seem to be recurring. And it seems like these guys who are supposed to be taking us into the future are often taking us into the past with the model of how the world's going to work. And we've seen that here in California with California Forever, this city these tech billionaires are trying to build in Solano County. They went around just throwing money at all the nonprofits to try to curry good favor and support and sort of silence potential opposition. And as Taylor mentioned earlier, it really warps the dynamic in these places when you split people because some people are being hired to support this thing or getting benefits from it. And others are being robbed by the very same groups or something's being taken away from them. And the power that's being seized is permanent power that's on the land, that's built a built structure.

So let's talk about something Zuckerberg posted today. It was kind of coincidental that we were going to talk about him and he posts this short essay where he optimistically extolled so-called super intelligence, which he portrays as something that will be totally positive, will improve the world, make all of our lives easier. We'll all have personal super intelligences that will make everything perfect somehow. And we kind of got this earlier, but if the future is going to be so perfect because of AI, then why are half the time these guys are talking about the potential global doom of humanity that will be unleashed by AI, yet the other half of the time they are pretending it's going to fix everything and there'll be abundance and plenty as a result of it.

If Zuckerberg is so optimistic about the future of AI, why is he spending over $300 million to build what appears to be a lot like a doomsday bunker?

Guthrie: I think one thing to note is there is just a lot of populist anger against billionaires right now in the world. And all of these tech billionaires' visions of the future seem to include billionaires and still seem to include massive wealth inequality. And so none of these visions for the future are addressing that inequality and addressing that anger. And so it makes sense that Zuckerberg would still be spending millions of dollars on security because there are still going to be a lot of people that are much less wealthy than him and who have a lot of anger towards wealth inequality today.

Gil: Taylor, is AI going to solve the billionaire problem or make it worse? Or worse, is it going to become a trillionaire problem next?

Taylor: I think it's going to become a trillionaire problem. We already have Elon Musk actually set to become the world's first official trillionaire. And I think that AI is just going to exacerbate wealth inequality. We're already seeing this happen where, you know, we're seeing it eliminate all of these jobs, not because it can necessarily do a lot of people's jobs, but it can sort of mimic or do maybe enough of a person's job. It's sort of like it's good enough for bosses to lay off knowledge workers and lay off people, you know, in creative jobs.

We're seeing it decimate things like the media industry, the entertainment industry, the marketing industry, the consulting industry. Not that we should pray for the consultants, but...

Producer: Please stop to think about McKinsey & Company and other highly paid consultants who will tragically lose money to AI. Now, a moment of silence.

[Laughter]

Taylor: I know. I just think the ripple effects of this sea change are going to be so significant and we have all of these people in charge in the government and just the billionaires that really run our political system that are accelerationists that just want this to happen as soon as possible. And they want to be the ones to control it. They just want to use these technologies to get richer and richer. We had Mark Zuckerberg writing about this, like, new world of the super intelligence that he thinks is going to come to fruition and, of course, wants to wield. And nobody is thinking about the very real human beings that are going to be affected.

I think this just goes back to the fact that these billionaires dehumanize their users. They dehumanize the people who are affected by these technologies. They just think all technological progress is for good. And that's not even to say also about the way the AI is going to be used for surveillance and policing and authoritarianism and just how much less free our society is going to get. As people get poorer, they will also be more censored and less free.

Gil: Guthrie, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about a decidedly non-technological question here. Zuckerberg is also raising cattle on this land and interestingly the cattle are fed on beer and macadamia nuts. Can you give us a sense of why he is plying his cows with beer and macadamias?

Guthrie: I honestly, I can't. I will say the land was used for ranching before he bought it and so I guess he is continuing ranching on that land. As to why he's feeding them beer and macadamia nuts. I'm not a cattle rancher. It seems a little unusual to me, but what do I know?

Gil Duran: Well, isn't it just, I think it's really to fatten them up and get them really highly marbled. I was trying to do a little research online before our podcast today and saw that there was environmentalists were saying this is like the most destructive way to do cattle farming with macadamia nuts, beer and the ranching. So we'll have to look more into that. He does seem to get into weird meat stuff quite often.

Guthrie: Yeah, I believe at one point he was trying to only eat meat that he had personally caught and killed. And I think he did give that up eventually. But yeah, he gets into weird meat stuff. You're right.

Gil Duran: And we'll be right back after these messages.

Producer: And now it's the time of the podcast where we do the plugs to support our guests. First up, Guthrie. He's active on X where he posts links to all his stories. You can catch him there and read his pieces. And speaking of pieces, make sure to check out the pieces in Rolling Stone and Wired. They're great. Next, Taylor. She is the essential internet culture Substack User Mag. Subscribe today. Also, her YouTube is pretty great too. Check out her latest videos there. And finally, check out Gil's stuff at thenerdwrite.com and become a paid subscriber to the newsletter. Cool stuff coming up for paid members soon. And now back to the pod with Taylor, Guthrie, and Gil.

Gil Duran: Speaking of AI making everyone's lives better or not, Guthrie, you've been replaced by AI before.

Guthrie: I was working at a small local newspaper in Hawaii. Last fall, they began to experiment with these bizarre AI newscasters. And when I first saw them, I thought that they had hired new reporters. And I was very happy because, you know, they almost would never hire new reporters. And it's super underfunded there. And they don't have enough reporters on the island.

But then I started watching these videos and I started to realize these aren't actually humans, these are really strange robots. And when you watch them closely, you realize that they're not speaking in a way that humans would speak. They have these strange, stilted conversations. I remember at one point they had a conversation about a pumpkin giveaway, and one of the AI hosts asked the other, "what is the effect these pumpkins have had on the community?" And the other one responds, "these pumpkins have brought joy to many."

And so, yeah, it's this really weird experiment. I think the idea was that it would generate additional revenue streams because the paper didn't have any sort of live broadcast component before these AIs existed. But they were never able to actually sell ads on these videos, I think because they were so off putting. And all the comment sections under them were like, "what the hell are you doing? Like, this is so strange." And so they did shut them down within like a three-month period, which was good to see. But it is sad to see, you know, a local news outlet instead of investing in actual reporters instead invest in like this weird AI moonshot that I think anybody that has eyes could tell you is a bad idea.

Gil Duran: Especially sad to see it on the local level like that where you really actually do need people who understand the community.Taylor, is this just the wave of the future? AI starting to replace people and having to make big enough mistakes to get fired?

Taylor: Yes, and they can't fire the AI. So it's just going to be like, “whoops, we made a mistake. Let's tweak it.” I saw Men's Health even, I think it was actually a human reporter, but he inserted an error into his story. And it was because he relied on an AI generated summary of an article that came atop the Google results. So I think AI is just generally going to displace more and more kind of creative workers. And yeah, it's depressing. I don't want it to happen. I'm trying to sort of like, I wonder if there's a...

I'm trying to get people to appreciate the value of, you know, human made bad writing.

Guthrie: And I saw that the Men's Health article that said that Luka Dončić had a 42 inch vertical at the draft combine, which if you know ball, no, he does not.

Gil Duran: Well, you really got to be careful with that AI stuff. I do a little bit of experimenting with LLMs. I'm interested in what answers they give to certain questions. And one of the questions that I ask them sometimes is to explain who I am. And one LLM actually told me recently that I've had a completely different career than the one I've actually had. And I was surprised to find that I'm actually happily married to a man.

So you really got a double, triple check. You can't use them in that way. You can't trust them, right? Don't trust and verify if you're going to do your research with LLMs, I'd say.

Taylor: What's so hard, though, is that, you know, I've talked to people about this. I was talking to college students and high schoolers about how they're increasingly using LLMs in their schoolwork. And a lot of them recognize that the information might be false, but they go to Google the information and try to get, you know, sources and Google and search results are also such a disaster. And there's really no way for them to sort of navigate this, this just like slopified information system that we've built. It's really hard. I even have tried to look things up recently, like, you know, just for cooking related stuff. And it's just, it's so hard to find information these days because you have to find the information that you have to sort of double check and triple check the information multiple times through multiple sources.

And you and I are journalists, we can do that, but most average people, they're just going to give up or they're just going to believe the nonsense.

Guthrie: Yeah, it is funny with those, Google AI search results, because it seems like any time I search something that I don't know much about, they seem like they're relatively accurate. But if I'm looking into an article that I've written about or anything I've studied extensively, they are shockingly wrong with incredible frequency.

Yeah, it does seem just insane that they post those right at the top of the page because it's so often they're just misinformation.

Gil: And it seems increasingly impossible to escape from this stuff. I use Brave. I use DuckDuckGo. I use Proton Mail. They're all starting to incorporate this same kind of crap into it. So you can't just have a clean experience. Everybody wants you to use the AI.

To some degree, there has to be a simpler, efficient “enough” for us to still use our brains in the manner that we're supposed to use them to remain intelligent and thoughtful and curious people.

One final question, Taylor, you had a big scoop this week about Substack sending out a push alert for a Nazi publication. And the stretch connection I'm going to make here is that if you read the book, Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn, written in the Sixties, which talks about the history of these end times, apocalyptic, millenarian movements throughout Western history, he felt that the Nazis were the last major realization of this, that the Nazis were an end times movement. They believe they were going to create a new world order, thousand year Reich, et cetera.

So, unfortunately, they still have some fans and some of them are writing on Substack and being promoted by Substack, perhaps inadvertently. Tell us about your story, what you found out and what it means.

Taylor: Yeah, well, thousands of people got, looked at their phone on Monday and got a push alert with a swastika telling them basically to subscribe to this Nazi newsletter that was talking about we need to build a whites only civilization and Jews are like parasites. And so that was shocking to a lot of people. And I saw people starting to post about it on Instagram being like, "what the hell? Like, what is this? Like, why is Substack encouraging me to follow that?"

When people clicked into the actual National Socialism Today, which is the newsletter. They were actually then prompted to follow another Nazi blog called The White Rabbit, which is actually quite popular on Substack. It's number 26 or 46. It's on Substack's rising in history list, which is like a promotional list that Substack has showing up and coming blogs. And so I wrote about this, you know, Substack said this was an error. We didn't mean to send this out. But I think that the issue is that there's just a growing amount of Nazi content, openly Nazi, like they have 1488, they're posting Hitler fan cams, I'm not, you know, using Nazi the way that like I think some liberals maybe use it to talk about people a little more broadly. Like these are self-identified Nazis. You know, this content is becoming popular and it's making its way into the marketing systems of Substack where this content is actually internally marketed through their app, accidentally by push notifications.

But even if you put the push notification aside, I think it's still like Nazi content is still included in this internal recommendation systems that Substack has. And I think that's a huge problem. So yeah, I spent like two days reporting this story and I published the scoop. And of course I'm on Substack and that prompted tons of people to unsubscribe from my Substack and I lost over a thousand dollars of income from publishing that scoop. So it's extremely depressing because there's no incentive to do journalism anymore. There's no incentive for people to support independent journalism. And I feel like every single time I publish a scoop, I'm punished for it. Every single time I publish a piece of accountability journalism, sort of, I guess, makes people less likely to use these platforms, which I'm sympathetic to. And I have a Patreon as well for this reason. If people want to subscribe over there, they can do that so that they don't have to subscribe through Substack. But I think a lot of people just see this stuff and rightfully feel this like revulsion. And so they just kind of log off. They don't want anything to do with any of these platforms. And then that hurts journalists’ ability to report on the platforms. So we're really in a bad, bad like race to the bottom, I would say.

Gil: Well, the race to the bottom, that seems like a pretty good note to end on here. Thank you both for joining me on this apocalyptic episode of the Nerd Reich podcast.

Guthrie: Thanks for having us.

Taylor: Thank you, Gil.

Producer: The Nerd Reich Podcast is produced and edited by me, R.R. Robbins.

It's written and hosted by Gil Duran.

Make sure to subscribe on YouTube and leave a comment if you can. It's all about the engagement so people can find us.

If there's something we should cover, send us a message at thenerdreich.com.

Today's final words from the Lizard King himself, Jim Morrison: “The future is uncertain, but the end is always near.” See you next time.

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