Record-Breaking Wine, ‘The Setting' Releases 2015 Alexander Valley Cabernet To Celebrate 10th Year
The Setting
When a 750ml bottle of wine called 'The Setting' broke a world record for being the most expensive wine ever sold at a charity auction in 2017, at $350,000, the wine world was jolted into recognition of this unknown wine from the Alexander Valley AVA of Sonoma County, California.
However, today, 'The Setting' is well known to collectors, and this month, winemaker Jessie Katz (bearer of more than twenty 100-point scoring wines) and his partners, Jeff Cova and Noah McMahon, released a limited amount of this very wine to the public. It is the 2015 The Setting Alexander Valley Cabernet, and a small number of cases were held back in the wine library after the auction to save for their 10th anniversary.
'2015 was the first year we made this cabernet sauvignon wine, and it came from a very special site at the top of Chalk Hill Road next to Verite Winery,' reported Jesse Katz, Head Winemaker for The Setting, in a Zoom interview. 'It was a drought year and so the grapes were small, stressed and concentrated. My job was to tame the beast.'
Jesse was successful because the resulting wine 'tied for the highest Wine Spectator rating since 1982,' he stated.
The 2017 auction where the 2015 The Setting Alexander Valley Cabernet broke the world record was Emeril Lagasse's annual charity auction, Carnivale du Vin, held in New Orleans. Jesse had gifted a bottle to Hollywood agent, Shep Gordon, who donated it to the auction where it was bid on by a private collector. The proceeds created opportunities for young people working in culinary, nutrition and arts education.
After the auction, Jesse and his partners held back some of the cases to save for their 10th anniversary. Now that the year 2025 has arrived, the wine is being released to the public on a 'first-come, first-served' basis until they run out. The current price is $165 per bottle – quite a good deal for a bottle of wine that sold for $350,000 at auction.
2015 The Setting Alexander Valley Cabernet, 10th Anniversary Vintage Wine Bottle
The Setting
Just one year after Jesse Katz broke the world record for creating the highest-priced wine ever sold at auction for $350,000, the record was broken again when a 1945 Romanée-Conti from Burgundy, France sold for $545,000 at a Sotheby's auction in 2018. To date, this wine stands as the most expensive 750ml bottle of wine ever sold.
However, in 2021, Jesse broke another world record when a 6-liter bottle (equivalent to 8 regular bottles of wine) of the 2019 The Setting Glass Slipper Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa Valley sold for $1 million at that year's Emeril Lagasse Foundation event.
'It is such an honor to have set the world record for the most expensive single bottle of wine ever sold and raise $1 million for a cause that is so close to my heart,' Jesse said, in a written statement after the auction.
Emeril Lagasse at One of His Charity Auctions for the Emeril Lagasse Foundation
Emeril Lagasse Foundation
Given that 'The Setting' is only 10-years old and has managed to break two world records – competing with the great wines of France, such as Domaine de la Romanée-Conti that was established in 1869 - many people are curious about the team behind the wine brand.
The answer is Jesse's two partners, Jeff Cova and Noah McMahon, who came up with the concept for the wine.
'Noah and I met in 2001, and started a nonprofit to support charity auctions with wine donations,' explained Jeff Cova during the Zoom interview. 'We enjoy supporting wineries by encouraging them to donate wine to important causes to help them promote brand recognition.'
One of those causes was the Pigs and Pinot Benefit started by Charlie Palmer and Daryl Groom in Healdsburg each March. The purpose is to support educational programs for culinary, wine accreditation, music and the arts.
'We saw that Jesse won most of the winemaking awards for the entire event, and so we reached out to him to create 'The Setting' wines, and over the years we have become great friends,' stated Noah McMahon, former marketing executive with the Walt Disney Company and Zero Gravity Corp.
The trio named the wine brand, 'The Setting,' because 'when people talk about wine and their experiences, they often remember the setting of where they were and who they were with. So we want to celebrate the setting as well as the wine,' explained Noah.
The wine is crafted in Jesse Katz's state-of-the-art winemaking facility at Aperture Winery in the Russian River, and supported by his winemaking and marketing team. The grapes are sourced from high-quality vineyards in different locations. For example, 'The Setting' produces cabernet sauvignon from both Sonoma and Napa, but also makes pinot noir and chardonnay from Oregon, and sauvignon blanc from Dry Creek Valley.
Each year a portion of 'The Setting' wines are donated to charities to raise money for special causes. The remainder of the wines are sold direct-to-consumer (DTC) through The Setting Society, an online wine membership portal.
'In addition, we donate a percentage of DTC sales proceeds to fundraising events across the nation,' stated Katie Garaventa, VP of DTC Sales & Marketing for The Setting, in an email interview.
The winery also develops collaborations with philanthropic organizations to create custom wine labels for charity events. 'Typically, they will purchase a barrel of wine from us (25 cases) and we then go through the process of creating a custom label for them with their logo that they then can auction off,' explained Katie.
To date, they have created collaborations with the Los Angeles Lakers, the Navy Seal Foundation, Ellen DeGeneres, Tony Hawk and Shep Gordon.
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CNET
11 minutes ago
- CNET
Dying Light: The Beast Hands-On: Brutal Survival in a Zombie-Ridden Forest
Two hours into my gaming preview of Dying Light: The Beast, I was jogging through a beautiful woodland dotted with cabins and park benches -- a spot that would make for a lovely vacation, if not for the hordes of zombies wandering all over. Despite stealthily creeping around, I was spotted by a large group and frantically fended them off with a shovel, growing more desperate and overwhelmed -- until my rage meter maxed out and I became a beast. I roared and tore the zombies limb from limb until the red haze lifted from my vision, leaving me human again to continue my journey through the park. At a preview event in Los Angeles, California, Polish studio Techland set me and other media members up to play the first few hours of Dying Light: The Beast. It's the next entry in the beloved Dying Light series of games, which combine first-person parkour movement with zombie horror action. After the long gap between the 2015 original and its 2022 sequel Dying Light 2 Stay Human, the third game is coming out just three years later, with a release date of August 22, 2025. Dying Light: The Beast is a course correction that brings back more of the horror and vulnerability that made the first game so successful, Dying Light franchise director Tymon Smektala told me. "Wtih Dying Light: The Beast, we want to recapture that fear, that horror, that tension that the first game had," Smektala said. "Maybe it was beginner's luck, but we actually managed to capture the atmosphere and the feel and the balance just right." Part of that is bringing back the first game's protagonist, Kyle Crane, who has been locked away for a decade while the zombie plague he once tried to contain rampages across the world. After escaping an underground lab, Crane quickly discovers that years of experiments done on him have left him with bursts of strength and bloodlust, which comes in handy when he's beset by mutated enemies -- he becomes a monster to fight monsters. Prior Dying Light games let players explore open-world cities with free-roaming parkour movement, leaping over railings and climbing up fire escapes. The Beast expands this to a seemingly less suitable environment: Castor Woods, a sprawling forest that feels like a national park, where players have to thread their way through woodlands, rivers, mountain paths and other terrain. Techland challenged itself to see if the series' parkour movement to evade zombies rather than fight them all would work in different biomes, Smektala said -- and he believes they've cooked up something unique that pushes players to change how they move and deal with the living and the dead. "So you could say, 'okay, maybe I can hide behind trees and try to use how dense the forest is to lose the chase,' but on the other hand, you never really know what you can find behind that tree, what hides in those forests," Smektala said. "We like the fact that there are places on the map where you basically feel weaker, where you feel more fragile." Techland Swinging between fragility and "Beast Mode" revenge In my handful of hours with The Beast, I frequently felt that sense of vulnerability, confidently taking on a couple zombies, only to get cornered by half a dozen more shambling up behind me. Combat feels slow and weighty, relying on timing to avoid exhausting myself. I had to circle enemies carefully and slip between their attacks as my melee swings gradually took them down one by one -- with guns and bullets scarce, at least early on. But when I'd hit (or had been hit) enough to fill my rage meter, the game's unique mechanic, Beast Mode, activated turning me into a monstrous force of nature, battering zombies and ripping off their limbs (if not worse -- the game's brutal dismemberment isn't for the weak-stomached). Beast Mode is a deliberate counterbalance for handling hordes and turning the tides in combat -- partially inspired, surprisingly, by the classic game Pac-Man. "Pac-Man, if you think about it, is actually also a survival game where you are chased by ghosts. You are super weak, just one touch and you die -- but there are those power pellet moments, you grab them and suddenly you can start chasing ghosts," Smektala said, comparing that "cathartic overpower state" to the new Dying Light's Beast Mode. To make sure these moments land when they're most needed, Techland has made under-the-hood tweaks, including filling the Beast Mode meter faster when the player is surrounded by zombies or when being chased by an undead horde at night (more on that later). The game keeps these mechanics hidden, Smektala explained, to prevent players from gaming the system. They're designed to heighten the thrill of pursuit and reversal -- fine-tuned through extensive player testing. "You really feel like these are your last moments, the zombies are coming at you … and they're just about to grab you and suddenly you see that meter has been charged and then you can turn 180 and get that moment of resetting the situation," Smektala said. Techland Beast Mode isn't the only escape route. Unlike the second Dying Light game where players can paraglide between buildings, The Beast's national park areas are too broad for aerial traversal -- but I could jump into abandoned vehicles and drive away from sticky situations… at least until the gas ran out. (You can refuel at select spots and unlock skills to burn less fuel.) Whether you're smashing zombies with improvised weapons, tearing through them in Beast Mode or mowing them down in a car, the game's brutality is unmistakable -- and it's been dialed up since the last Dying Light, thanks to further optimizations to Techland's in-house C-Engine. For The Beast, the studio has doubled the number of possible wounds zombies can take, so whether you strike the head or midsection, you'll see injuries that match. Techland also went all-in on realistic blood spatters rendered by C-Engine: Artists ordered liters of fake blood and spent days creating real-life splats to digitize for the game. "So if you enter a room [in the game] and you see blood dragging on the floor or a blood splat on the wall, actually there was an actor in our mock-up studio that was dragging his body on the floor to leave that mark, and then we just scanned it and put it into the game," Smektala said. Techland Surviving the least relaxing vacation of your life My preview started an hour or so into Dying Light: The Beast, after Crane escapes from the underground facility. He's woken up in the territory of The Baron, a sadistic noble ruling over the national park-like territory in an unspecified European country -- one inspired by Swiss landscapes, a Techland developer told me. His small army of soldiers roam the land doing his bidding, adding another hazard standing between Crane and escape, but they're far from the worst things in this strange land. After escaping the facility, Crane wanders down a mountain trail to find a monastery that he clears of zombies to turn into a safe house. But his final task is to face a mutated monstrosity with a gas mask -- the game's first boss. After putting it in the ground, a scientist named Olivia introduces herself and pledges to help Crane. She takes a blood sample from the creature and convinces Crane to administer it to himself, granting him the upgrade to his Beast Mode. These monsters, which Olivia calls Chimeras, are the faulty results of The Baron's experiments. They roam the woodlands and she urges Crane to hunt them down to grow stronger so he can defeat the psychopathic noble. Each new kill grants a point in the Beast Mode skill tree, unlocking bonuses and new abilities like a ground slam. One of the mutated Chimera types, the Behemoth, that players face in the game. Techland After that, the game opens up, allowing players to alternate between following the main story or side quests and engaging with the game's open world -- exploring territory, gathering supplies and weapons and establishing safe houses to rest and recover. The safe houses are key to waiting out the dangerous dark hours, as the day-night cycle from Dying Light's earlier games returns. When the sun sets, powerful nocturnal ghouls called Volatiles emerge. If alerted, they'll unleash zombie hordes in a chase sequence that only ends with clever evasion -- or reaching a safe house. While players can simply sleep through the night, certain treasure-laden zombies only emerge after twilight, and I imagine other incentives or missions will lure players out of their safe houses. Nighttime also becomes more manageable as players get stronger, either through acquiring equipment or leveling up -- killing enemies will give Crane a bit of experience, while finishing story missions will award a lot. Every level grants a skill point to improve Crane's stealth, parkour or combat abilities, which are important to gather to handle some of the game's tougher enemies, from zombies in combat armor to Chimeras encountered in the wild. As players explore and fill in the map, they'll find some areas have level thresholds. I was driving around when I spotted an intriguing building across the river -- an abandoned mental hospital likely full of loot -- but it was 8 or 9 levels above me, and I didn't want to risk it. You can offset level gaps with gear: Weapons are scattered throughout the world, with rarer loot hidden in riskier spots -- like the military convoy I cleared out to score higher-level equipment. Other weapons must be crafted, and there's a cornucopia of materials scattered around, some that you'll pick up off the ground and others scavenged from defeated zombies. You'll need blueprints to make key weapons -- I found one for a bow in the starting monastery safe house -- and yes, once I built it, I needed to craft the arrows, too. Kyle Crane, the protagonist of the original Dying Light game, returns in Dying Light: The Beast. Techland Becoming your own Beast With a sprawling map to explore, crafting and skill trees, Dying Light: The Beast felt like a familiar yet fun mashup of Far Cry and Mirror's Edge, all set in lovely woodland scenery (as an outdoorsy person, I'm partial to the natural setting, though there is a town in the game to provide some urban parkouring). Combined with the day-night cycle and a story pitting survivors against the vicious Baron, open-world game fans have a lot to chew on in Techland's upcoming game -- especially those who want a bit more of a challenge in their combat. To ameliorate that difficulty, The Beast offers co-op mode, letting players team up with up to three friends. But teaming up won't make the game instantly easier, as Techland made sure to adjust the game's challenge accordingly, from spawning more zombies and making them stronger to giving them area-of-attack swipes to hurt multiple teammates. The Chimeras will be especially beefed up -- so much so that players may not be able to take them down solo when playing with others in a game session. A couple hours into the preview, after taking down a pair of hulking Chimeras, I was tasked with chasing down a third in a swamp. This fiend was different -- a spindly blood-soaked ghoul that reminded me of the fearsome Witch special enemy from the Left 4 Dead games. She dashed in and out of the foggy marshland, and I struggled to track her and land hits while dodging her own -- barely eking out a win thanks to some clutch Beast Mode transformations. When I next took on a hefty Chimera with a concrete slab for an arm that I encountered after delving into the train tunnels, it became clear Techland had designed each of these fights as its own unique arena brawl. I was down in the depths, hunting an especially lethal monster that had been terrorizing survivors, and that Chimera wasn't it. After chasing down the culprit, I pulled back the hood to reveal a familiar face -- Crane's own. Another failed experiment, maybe? As my preview ended, I was left wondering what The Beast truly referred to. As I stepped away, I could feel the game's open-world hooks sinking in -- I just wanted to craft one more weapon, secure one more safe house, hunt one more Chimera and push past the edge of my map. Dying Light: The Beast launches on August 22 for PC, PS5 and Xbox One X/S.
The Verge
13 minutes ago
- The Verge
Why tech billionaires want a ‘corporate dictatorship'
Hello, and welcome to Decoder! This is Jon Fortt, CNBC journalist, co-host of Closing Bell: Overtime, and creator of the Fortt Knox streaming series on LinkedIn. 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. 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: he's worked as press secretary and comms director for high-profile California politicians like Gov. Jerry Brown and Senator Diane Fiensten, and he also advised Kamala Harris when she served as California's Attorney General. Listen to Decoder, a show hosted by The Verge's Nilay Patel about big ideas — and other problems. Subscribe here! Now, writing The Nerd Reich, Gil 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 Gil 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 see them pushing the country further and further away from democracy and toward something resembling a kind of cross between unrestrained capitalism and monarchy. This idea has been kicking around for quite a while now. You'll hear Gil 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 JD Vance. And that's Gil's central thesis here: that while these ideas are not new, their embrace 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, Gil argues that it has created a dangerous coalition between the far right and the stewards of the biggest, most popular tech platforms and products. After all, as we've seen with Elon Musk 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. Gil 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. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Gil Duran, great to have you here on Decoder. Thanks for having me. Well, we're going to talk about The Nerd Reich, of course, because that's what you write, what you podcast, and what you do. But first, a disclosure: You and I first met 31 years ago as high school seniors. We received the same journalism scholarship, went to the same college, and we're friends. We started our journalism careers. You focused more on culture, government, and 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 Villaraigosa, Dianne Feinstein. But that's a bit of a past life for you. At this moment, our worlds collide. The government and culture stuff, and the business and tech stuff. So, what is the Nerd Reich? 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. Some people call this movement the Dark Enlightenment, the neo-reactionary movement, or the network state. It's backed by a handful of CEOs and billionaires: people like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, with involvement from people like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and the granddaddy of them all, Peter Thiel, who's been promoting some of these ideas for decades. What's wrong with it? Well, I 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're pretty explicit about this point. You and I did Poli Sci 101 together at DePaul. 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 tapping into that and proposing a product or a model that will put them at the supreme head of world government in the future. 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. This reminds me of some themes from a book I read in high school, by author Ayn Rand, called The Fountainhead, and I think you and I might've talked about this during freshman year in college as well. It's also 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, 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.' 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 Yiddish saying, 'If you're rich, you're also handsome and you can sing.' So, it's this idea that because you're rich, you can now do everything. We see this Dunning-Kruger approach with everyone from Elon Musk to Jeff Bezos going into businesses where they have no experience and making a mess of things. So, they're trying to do that basic idea with governance. You're right, a lot of people trace this back to ideas like Galt's Gulch [in Atlas Shrugged]. It's an idea we find throughout science fiction, with enclaves of tech elites controlling everything. Usually, they're the bad guys. 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 long-standing historical problem. The best we've gotten in our thousands of years 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. Now, one of the leading thinkers on the tech billionaire side of this is a guy named Curtis Yarvin. He recently had a debate at Harvard, and he seems to have done pretty well. How would you frame how Yarvin approaches these things? Yarvin is a computer programmer and a pseudo-intellectual who, in the early 2000s, started inventing his own theory of politics, largely catering to the idea that instead of a democracy, we need a 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 Frisk Corp, run by a corporation called Frisk Corp, where everybody would be under constant and total surveillance even in the privacy of their own homes. This is what would ensure your security, and you'd need to swipe in and swipe out to get in or out of the city. 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 underestimating how authoritarian governments work. Because if everybody could just leave, people would just leave North Korea, China, all these countries. They don't do that for a reason — because they're not allowed to. Or maybe it's Singapore. Well, that's one idea it's become. So, a few years later, Balaji Srinivasan, who's the former CTO of Coinbase and 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 as an inspiration. He's considered Peter Thiel's house philosopher. Well, Srinivasan sees that the association with Yarvin makes it 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, Balaji Srinivasan tries to update it to something called The Network State and puts out this whole book where he basically tries to rebrand it 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. So I guess if I were to take the other side, which I have to do to keep it interesting, one could say that Yarvin's ideas aren't so far from, say, Alexander Hamilton's? And the dynamic between Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson was a healthy dynamic in the formation of American ideas. Hamilton was accused of being a monarchist. He was pretty clearly in favor of smart and rich people having a lot more power and say over how things went than everybody else. Thomas Jefferson, despite his many contradictions and hypocrisies, was the man of the people, the pro-democracy guy. Well, I think Yarvin would like that comparison. I don't think he deserves it. 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? I've actually been in government at City Hall, in the state capital in Sacramento. There are some hard decisions, some complex issues, that don't lend themselves to this simplistic thinking of a bunch of guys who spend all their lives with their necks craned over their computers in the code. That's what they just don't get. That's the missing element of their ideas. Yarvin is not a PhD in anything, in history. If you talk to political scientists and historians as I have been doing, because I'm writing a book on this subject, 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, thinkers, and historians who have debunked the basic ideas here. So, they're operating at a basic level, almost like high schoolers arguing, or us maybe freshman year arguing over Galt's Gulch. Or remember we had some weird debates over stuff that neither of us really knew about, but we were really going to be right about it. That's what they're doing, except they're grown men. The problem 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. 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 and 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're now in a time when people are lionizing those who have made a lot of money over those who have gained knowledge or experience in a given area? It seems like the result of some failed promise. Well, definitely. 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. 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 '80s and the '90s, 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 think when the effects of these tariffs hit, Trump's poll numbers started sinking, and people are learning in their own ways that great wealth doesn't equal wisdom, and it doesn't equal leadership. Trump has been able to get pretty far on an illusion, but there's only one Donald Trump. Whether you love him or hate him, there's no denying that he's had a 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. You certainly don't get that with Curtis Yarvin. 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 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 transhumanism and the network state and all these weird ideas that they plan to impose on people. So, I think the bigger problem is that 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 or esoteric. Now, 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 covered this before The New York Times or The Washington Post. I was writing stuff last year that they're just getting around to now, and believe me, as happy as I am to be a freelance writer who found an important story, I shouldn't have been the guy talking about this last year. Last year was when the American people deserved to know about this stuff. 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 — as a matter of fact, 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, had a lot of power and made a lot of decisions that one would easily argue were important. Is that wrong? Well, he mischaracterizes FDR as a monarch or a dictator, which is not true because FDR was elected. FDR was beloved, and after FDR left, someone else took his place who was not a member of his family. After that, a few years later, someone from the opposite party was in charge. So, that's how the American government works. But here's the clue for why Yarvin is obsessed with FDR. FDR was an emergency wartime president. He was president during the Great Depression and WWII, a time of great crisis. 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 in order to get more power, 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. I wrote a piece at The Nerd Reich about a startup here in California that 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 happen to be endangered migratory bird habitats. Everywhere we look, even this ridiculous example today, we're seeing this desire for an emergency, which is a way to grab power. So, I think that's the key to understanding Yarvin's slanderous obsession with FDR: the emergency powers he was granted. That idea of an emergency is, I think, a thread throughout law, right? But emergencies are hard to define. The one recent example is the situation in LA around these protests. Were they mostly peaceful protests? Or were they riots and insurrections? It just 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, an emergency, in a way, is in the eye of the beholder and in the context of where the beholder thinks the country's heading. Well, I guess to some degree, when you look at different feeds, you're seeing different things. But in California, when there's an emergency, the governor has the power to act. 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 on the National Guard, that's the governor's job. The governor called in the National Guard back in 2020 when there were several days of destruction and violence in Sacramento. So, this was Trump seizing on the perception created by Fox News and Elon Musk's X to insert himself 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. More than anything right now, Donald Trump wants confrontation. So, like with Silicon Valley, they're always crying about a crisis that they're actually rushing to create at the same time. AGI 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 is what seems to be the logic they apply there. Another thing I find interesting about the FDR argument that Yarvin makes is that FDR started social safety nets, big government expansion, massive economic stimulus, and labor rights support. He arguably laid the groundwork for the Great Society. That doesn't sound like what this crowd wants to repeat. No, they want to use the powers of a dictatorship to go in the 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 and could no longer afford anything. But a new technology called cybercurrency 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 be safe as everything fell apart outside of the walls. We have a bunch of CEOs telling us that AI is going to get rid of millions and millions of jobs. Well, what's going to happen to those people who can no longer work? 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. 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. 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 is approving of your existence? There's a question there that these guys hint at, but never answer. I think that's a place where you have to go in politics. We have to talk about what the future looks like if they're going to kill all jobs. So what's the solution then? Because short of regulating AI out of existence… If indeed we are heading toward [artificial general intelligence], 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 conversation 20 or 25 years ago about the internet. In short, the internet did eliminate encyclopedia salesman jobs, but people are still necessary in the loop. I mean, as the US somehow tries to stop the development of this technology elsewhere, there are technology companies and smart people at these companies who are going to continue working on it. Well, I think you need a smart approach to regulation. Unfortunately, what we have now is an effort to ban all regulation because these guys have captured the White House with Trump. I think that it's hard to distinguish between the hype of [artificial general intelligence] and the very real harms of AI, which will come in a simpler form: the bias we already see coming out of these companies in 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 crazy. 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. When you have that much money, you don't just talk about it, you take steps to make it happen. 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 FDR to be a traitor to his class and rise up and find a way to put these billionaires back in their place. Well, to go back to the FDR idea here, what if this is part of the natural rhythm of the American climate? That when things go too extreme in one direction, you had the robber barons and all of that, the roaring '20s and their extremes, there needs to be or ends up being some 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 built up on that side, and now what these guys and their crazy ideas represent is merely a pendulum swing in the other direction? 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. Balaji Srinivasan name-checks Ida Tarbell as a major enemy. He's still mad about what she did to Standard Oil, and she's been dead since 1944. So, I think they're looking for a way to end the game. 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, and that's why they're teamed up with MAGA, because here's a president who's willing to sell to the highest bidder and who's completely testing the law, the constitution, and the limitations on executive power. 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 applause and silence from almost all of Silicon Valley. 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, is this what we're seeing, the expansion of Atherton? For people who aren't familiar with the Bay Area, Atherton is outside of Palo Alto. A lot of CEOs and venture capitalists live there, and it's the weirdest place in the Bay Area I've ever been because you go there and there are these streets and hedges that are 15 feet tall. You can barely see any houses. In some areas, you can't see any houses at all because that's the idea. You're not supposed to see anybody's house, but super-rich people live there. If they invite you and they open the gate behind the hedges, you can go in. 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 you see mostly pickup trucks from people who are coming to service the properties on the streets. That idea seems to have expanded in recent years, even beyond Atherton, where 25 years ago — and not to lionize this guy — but Steve Jobs was living in Palo Alto, sending his kids to public school, and local families trick-or-treated at his house. It's very different from the Atherton mindset that seems to have expanded lately. 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 a social media hit. So, you had the financial crisis in 2008, 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 MeToo Movement, which led to a lot more public awareness and sensitivity around certain structures of oppression. That pissed off a lot of people who felt pretty powerful and rich and without problems before that. Then we had the pandemic, which completely made us all work together for a while and created some divisions over 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. I think that's what the problem is. I do remember that 20 years ago, living in San Francisco, some people who had been there a while were really disdainful of the techies and saw them as a threat, as this thing that was going to bring bad ideas and change to the town. I thought they were exaggerating. I didn't think it was that bad. It turns out, actually, it is that bad. Well, interesting. Let's visit that for a moment because the national popular image of San Francisco is a place where needles are being passed out and homeless encampments are spreading throughout the city. 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 that there's been this enormous investment in office space and in the downtown to the exclusion of the livability of actual individuals' families. It was to the point where when the pandemic hit and companies shut down, we went to work from home, and San Francisco became a ghost town because there had been so much emphasis placed on office space versus people actually living there. What do you think is the truth of what San Francisco is now, what it has become, and who it's serving? Well, San Francisco is the best and most beautiful city in the United States. I mean, it's an amazing place. There are all kinds of things happening, and there are areas of town that are bad. 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 are poor people. When you tend to put them all in one neighborhood — and I grew up in a poor neighborhood, so I know – but 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 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 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. But what's happened is that there's been this Fox News-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? 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, et cetera. So, that part of the story is very fictional, but people have been priced out. That's a story all across California and all across many parts of the nation. Wages aren't keeping up in a way that allows people to continue to live in this country. A recent study showed that 60 percent of Americans have trouble making ends meet and affording the basics. That's the problem we've got to solve. So, these tech billionaires always want to scream 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 want to 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, 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. I think it's going to 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 are a few homeless people, but that's about a mile away. The problem with downtown is that people can work from home now. So, all the restaurants that were there for years serving lunch are 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, everything's booming because that's where things have moved to. So, we've seen this migration out of office space. It turns out we didn't need it because technology disrupted it, and people would rather not go to the office every day. 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. 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, Newsmax, and by the president of the United States gives people a false impression of what's happening. So we might just be in this transition period, going back to this idea of climate versus weather, where the cities were designed for an 1980s or 1990s reality in how people go throughout their day, and also work, play, and live. But some of the fundamental mechanics of that have changed because technology and people are going to work, play, and live differently. 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 end up with problems when you've got setups like that. Definitely. 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. 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. There are some 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. I do think we're at a point where we have to figure out, with all the technologies we have and all of the future that we see right in our face, why can't we solve the basic old problems? Unfortunately, there's a political disconnect there where the people who say they want to solve these problems only want to solve them in a certain way. Then there's the political disagreement. For instance, there's this book, Abundance, that came out and that everybody's fighting about all the time. Oh, sure, Abundance 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, and morality. So, even if we had housing for everybody, someone would object because you have to work to get into the housing. 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 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 conclusively that it's wrong, but all these tech CEOs here are pro 'you have to get the treatment or you don't get the housing.' Well, if you couldn't get government contracts if you were on drugs, that would be interesting. [Laughs] Yeah, well, the rules only apply to some people. Drug tests are for the little people. Are we in a situation where technology and democracy are fundamentally at odds? Are we in a cotton gin moment in a way? Because with every new technology, somebody tries to frame it like this is the solution to inequality — the digital divide, we're going to solve that. We didn't solve the digital divide. As we saw during COVID, kids who had means and were home from school actually tended to do better in isolation. Kids who were in even really high-powered charter school-type programs like KIPP did far worse. It debunked the argument that these charter school programs, like KIPP, are cherry-picking the most promising kids out of the inner city. And the reason why they do well is because they would've done well anyway, because a lot of those kids really had a lot of trouble when they were disconnected from that structured environment and from intense attention from teachers, academic preparedness, et cetera. But it's happening again now with AI. So, I really wonder if we are in this march of technological progress, but if technology and democracy, fairness, and economic opportunity are fundamentally at odds. Is there any way to shift that equation that you see? Well, social justice and economic justice would be considered woke now by this new generation of CEOs, and they think they just defeated all of those ideas. 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? 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 maybe harm the majority of people to benefit a small 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? 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 come out of government for the public good, for national security, for some other incentive, to try to solve the problem in a different way. So, I don't know how you can fix that problem as long as we're going to let a handful of extremely wealthy megalomaniacs guide the progress. But you don't think that the mindset of this handful of people who you've highlighted as being part of the Nerd Reich is the dominant mindset in Silicon Valley? There seems to be a range. I talked to a lot of people in Silicon Valley, a lot of CEOs and founders, and very few of them seem to be strongly aligned with this libertarian objectivist group. Some are like, 'Oh, this'll pass. I didn't like the Biden policies. So, maybe this is a bit better.' Some are actively against the direction that this administration, this government, is going, but hey, they have 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 do or try, or support something different? Well, it depends on who wins. Silence is complicity, and people sometimes get mad. They say, 'Don't say all tech, don't say all Silicon Valley.' Well, where are all the techies in Silicon Valley, the CEOs, speaking out against this stuff? Where are the people standing up and saying, '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. That's what I see. I don't see one really speaking out. That's a frequent criticism in this administration of the likes of Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, and that paper's slogan, 'Democracy dies in darkness.' Now, 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 not to be in direct opposition to the Trump administration, no? Well, definitely, he wants to keep all of his government contracts, and he's gutted an editorial board that would've been a big voice in a time like this for speaking as a conscience of the nation. He has some childish idea that he can just be for freedom and economic markets without those being political. I think Bezos is totally going for self-interest. 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. They just want to be on the side that's winning, to steal a phrase from Bob Dylan. That to me is the scariest part about all of it. Growing up in this country, I grew up in a very conservative place. I think when I was really young, I had some Republican leanings just because of what I was surrounded by. It was a very patriotic town, and a lot of people in my family enlisted in the military for no particular reason. It was considered just a thing to do. You serve your country. It's amazing to grow up and to realize, as I head toward 50, that so many people just don't believe in anything, don't believe in this country, and don't really care what happens to it as long as they get theirs. That is just not the way I ever thought it would be. That has been a bit of a surprise to me. If you can't have a little bit of courage when you have billions and billions of dollars, I think the value of that money is suspect. I think it's going to take Americans who are not billionaires to save 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. We've talked about the collapse or weakening of many institutions. You've worked for big media companies, 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 move the needle, maybe you're living that out now? No? Well, I'd say it's more a situation where billionaires in technology have killed journalism jobs. I would've 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 writing. You write on the side, and you find other ways to survive. I think that we were talking earlier about technology taking jobs. Do you remember the San Jose Mercury News in 1998, compared to now? I do. So, there was a bit of a decimation. But I think the bigger problem is the economics of it, where any place you go — and I was at the San Francisco Examiner — it's just layoffs all the time. It gets a bit depressing, and then the rules get tighter and tighter. 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. I was actually going to leave journalism, but I found this story, and I felt like I had to tell this story. Maybe this is the last story I'll tell as a journalist. So, I did it. But fortunately, there are positive parts of technology. It doesn't all have to be controlled by a handful of fascists. We deserve technology as well. We deserve technology that doesn't come with the threat of losing our freedom, of losing our identity, of losing our way of life. Ironically, technology has created this system now where I can have direct subscribers and do my work and reach people on podcasts and on YouTube. So, we're all in this soup. My argument is not that technology is bad. I am 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 public ownership of some of these things as well. Unpack some of that because, as you said, you are not a Luddite. In fact, you are embracing lots of technology and how you're distributing this Nerd Reich message, this newsletter and podcast, and you're using some AI in how the message is formulated and distributed, right? Like the imagery. Tell me about that. Oh, well, I forbade that on the podcast. We're using Adobe now; I use Shutterstock. I prefer real human images. There was a moment early on when I used a bit of OpenAI's image generation. It was like a new toy, and I used it actually to depict the future that some of these guys want. Actually, Balaji Srinivasan had talked about this Gray 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 his phrase into OpenAI, into DALL-E, and it created this terrifying, horrific image that looked actually like Trump's parade over the weekend. But the more I have had conversations with people and talked about this stuff, the more uncomfortable I've become with using those tools. I think right now we're seeing this phase of an AI art aesthetic that's going to look really bad in a few years, especially when you think about the amount of theft and robbery taking place to create these little toys and the idea that it 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. So I use Shutterstock. I think most people who are looking for the words, anyway. 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.' I don't think we can get to a point where we just use AI as long 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? Andreessen Horowitz is one of the main investors in this.' 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, it takes a smaller percentage of your pay. I've had bigger growth on it. It really does depend on your content. You're not going to become a big Substack writer with a crappy blog. If you're a good writer, you can take it elsewhere. So, I think we all have to navigate these relationships, and there's no way to be perfect, just like we use fossil fuels. We eat products that might be harvested under unethical conditions, but we have to strive to be more conscious of our relationships with these technologies and to do better if we can. 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 like being like, 'Okay, I'm not going to import that meat from that far away and burn all those fossil fuels.' You're still podcasting. You're still using the internet, right? It's technology. What are you finding about the feedback that you're getting? What's driving the growth and the engagement on the platforms where people are hearing your thesis and the guests with whom you're speaking? I think people have been looking for a way to make sense of what's happening. This has been a missing piece of the puzzle: 'What's happening with Silicon Valley?' It's a rightward turn. It's mating 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 founded by or funded by Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen. People wonder why all this is happening. No one's been telling a cohesive narrative in the mainstream press about why it's happening. That's very much been my focus. 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've got some conspiratorial people on the scene. I think that the press is finally starting to catch up to what I was trying to say last year. If Kamala Harris had won, 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've been pushed back a few years. I think it still would've been relevant, but it would've 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. I didn't think that Trump would already be pushing 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. 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 that 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. 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. Once you explain it to them, they understand it. They have the tools to understand what's happening, and the democracy of information is necessary for citizens to make the right decisions. I don't see why people are censoring an important part of this story. I spent my life as a journalist at establishment newspapers, working for establishment politicians. I'm a pretty solid evidence-based guy. 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. The fact that they're racing to do it now proves the point. Well, let's close on a hopeful note then. Paint for me — and get out your greens and yellows perhaps — the picture of how America, how society, and 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? 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, 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. 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. 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. I haven't tested this out, so poke holes in it, if you will. But the Republican Party and the right have become more centralized in Donald Trump than at any time, I would argue, in our lifetimes. Even Republicans who don't agree with large portions of what he's said, 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 charismatic figure, dangerous as those might be, to help people believe? 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 percent 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've got AOC and Bernie Sanders going around drawing tens of thousands of people in traditionally conservative areas. People are looking for leaders who speak to their basic core values and issues, and the Democratic Party just wants to play tag along with crypto. They want to be a lighter version of the Republican Party. I think that way lies doom. I think especially with these younger people coming up today, they are not in the 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. Again, if the Democratic Party can't find a way to message that, then someone else will come along and do it for them. Who? Oh, I don't know. I don't think the leader has yet appeared, but people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders have. And Zohran Mamdani in New York seems to be tapping into something very powerful. If the Democrats aren't going to do it, then someone else will. All right. Gil Duran, the podcast and the newsletter are The Nerd Reich. Is the book also called The Nerd Reich? The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Global Democracy. Now we're early, but you're writing it probably right before we got on here and right after, in all kinds of moments. 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? Oh, 2026, but if you want to keep up with the progress, it's and it's free. Oh, there's like a progress bar. Well, I'm giving people some updates, and you can see where I'm going with stuff. Gil, thank you for coming on Decoder. Thank you. Questions or comments about this episode? Hit us up at decoder@ We really do read every email! A podcast from The Verge about big ideas and other problems.
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The Most Unique Surprising Celebrity Baby Names
Celebrity baby names aren't just fodder for inspiration: Whether they realize it or not, we are forever pitting celebs against each other in an imaginary competition of who can come up with the most unusual baby name. The contenders are many and impressive. Though many famous parents who have welcomed babies in the last couple of years have been relatively tame in their name choices, we have to give thanks for the likes of Usain Bolt, for twin-baby names of Saint and Thunder; Ashley Tisdale and husband Christopher French, who welcomed their daughter, Jupiter Iris; and Samira Wiley and Lauren Morelli, for their twist on two classics for their baby girl, George Elizabeth. Thunder, George, and Jupiter now join a generation that already includes Powerful Queen, Lyra Antarctica, Buddy Dessert, X Æ A-12, and Raddix Madden. And all of them are part of a pack that stretches back to the likes of Moon Unit Zappa (the daughter of the late musician Frank Zappa), showing us just how ahead of the curve Hollywood kids have been for generations now. Choosing a name for your child can be a thrill, especially if you get creative with it (although we do advise steering clear of naming your babies Covid and Corona. Yikes). But it can also be overwhelming — the name will follow your little for the rest of their life. Plus, when it comes to names, everyone seems to have an opinion. The good news? Baby names are constantly changing and evolving, which means you have a lot of options out there. And luckily for us regular folks, celebs tend to be major pioneers in choosing truly out-there baby names people love to discuss — plus unusual names that are just super-cool and avant-garde. And hey, there's no shame in getting some baby-name inspo from Celebland and stashing it away for your own kids (whether they're currently gestating or just imagined in your distant future). If you started considering fruit names after Gwyneth Paltrow named her daughter Apple or ran through all the colors of the rainbow when Beyoncé named her daughter Blue, we won't judge. For every beyond-weird celebrity baby name out there, there's another one that's just wacky and cool and beautiful enough, we might even pick it for our own kids. You decide which is which ahead. A version of this article was originally published in August 2016. More from SheKnows These 'Dark Academia' Baby Names Are Just the Right Blend of Broody & Intellectual Best of SheKnows Celebrity Exes Who Are Co-Parenting Right These 17 Celebrity Couples Have the Sweetest Baby-Naming Traditions All the Celebrity Parents Who Had Their Kids Via Surrogate Wolf Monte & Nakano Oceana Amanda Pacheco and Wilmer Valderrama share a son named Wolf Monte and a daughter named Nakano Oceana, both of which are some seriously unique nature-inspired names! Somersault Wonder In documents obtained by People, Sia and her estranged husband Dan Bernad, welcomed a baby daughter named Somersault Wonder Bernad on March 27, 2024. She's adopted two sons in the past but has never released their names. Eevi Lillian Olympic gold medalist Ryan Murphy and his wife Bridget knew they were giving their daughter a unique name, so they were sure to share its meaning right away. 'Family of 3!' the proud parents wrote in a joint birth announcement on Instagram. 'Eevi Lillian Murphy🪽 … A name of Finnish origin meaning 'life.'' The name is pronounced the same way as 'Evie,' but it has a special spelling that will set this headline-making little girl apart. Poetry Lucia & Locket Romance Too Hot to Handle's Francesca Farago and Jesse Sullivan welcomed twins in Nov. 2024. 'Poetry Lucia & Locket Romance Sullivan🤍,' Farago captioned their birth announcement on Instagram. Followers had mixed feelings about the unique names. 'u had 9 months to pick a name…,' one follower said. 'Wait these names are perfect,' another said. We personally think the names are among the best names that celebrity parents of twins have picked, especially given the backstory. Soon after, Sullivan — who is also dad to son Arlo Bear — shared that he gave Farago a golden locket with pictures of Arlo, their dog, and their cats for their first Valentine's Day. 'We fell in love with the name Locket,' he explained. 'We said this really early on that if we ever have a kid, we want to name him or her Locket.' 'We just loved the name Romance,' he continued. 'It was so beautiful and cool and badass. So we thought that Locket Romance just sounds like the coolest guy you've ever met.' As for their daughter, her middle name is her maternal grandma's name, and the couple thought the feeling you get when you hear or say 'poetry' is 'so beautiful.' 'And she's so beautiful, so it fits her,' Sullivan continued. 'We like names that feel romantic in general.' SantiGold Journalist Elaine Welteroth and her husband Jonathan Singletary share two sons. Though they've kept their first son's name private, their second child is named SantiGold Singletary. 'I wasn't originally going to but I'm just so obsessed with his name,' Welteroth told People. 'His name means peace in Thai and it means Saint in Spanish.' Jupiter Iris & Emerson Clover The Masked Dancer host Ashley Tisdale and her husband Christopher French named their daughter Jupiter, after the planet and the king of the Roman gods, and the middle name Iris, after the flower and the Greek word for rainbow. On Sept 2024, they welcomed another daughter named Emerson Clover! Malibu Barbie & Elvis YouTuber and singer Trisha Paytas gave birth to her first child on September 14, 2022, announcing it with a sweet series of photos on Instagram. But it may be her choice of baby names that catches the eye more than the actual baby: Malibu Barbie Paytas-Hacmon. But hey, Barbiecore baby names are definitely trending, so maybe she's just way ahead of the curve! Two years later, in June 2024, Malibu Barbie welcomed a little sister named Elvis. Because little girls can be rockers too! Rumble Honey, Slim Easy, & Whimsy Lou Lucky Blue Smith and Nara Aziza's children have quite unique first and middle names: Rumble Honey, Slim Easy, and Whimsy Lou. Phoenix & London Paris Hilton and Carter Reum named their son Phoenix and their daughter London. The TV personality shared in an episode of her podcast that she always knew she wanted to name her daughter after the special city. 'I've been planning my children's names for years and years,' she said. 'I knew when I was a little girl that I always wanted to have a daughter one day named London because London is one of my favorite cities in the world.' And how cool is it that Paris, Phoenix, and London all share names with major cities? Maple Kendall Schmidt and Mica Von Turkovich welcomed a girl named Maple four months after tying the knot. They shared the news on Instagram with the caption reading, '♥️Maple♥️.' Raddix & Cardinal Madden Cameron Diaz and husband Benji Madden welcomed their baby daughter Raddix Madden in 2020. Pamela Redmond Satran of Nameberry told SheKnows, 'Raddix could be a variation on the established Slavic name Radek, which means 'happy,' or it could be an invented name combining the 'rad' (as in cool) prefix with the trendy x ending.' On March 22, 2024 Benji Madden and Cameron Diaz revealed the news that they welcomed a son, named Cardinal into their now family of four. They shared the news on Instagram, saying, 'We are blessed and excited to announce the birth of our Son, Cardinal Madden❤️🙏He is awesome and We are all so happy he is here! For the kids safety and privacy we won't be posting any pictures- but he's a really cute ☺️We are feeling so blessed and grateful 🍀Sending much love from our fam to yours 🙏❤️Best wishes and Good Afternoon!! 🤘⚡️' Aya & Ohm During her 2024 Valentine's Day post, Hilary Swank revealed her twin's names are Aya and Ohm! Halo On Jan 6, 2024, Halle Bailey shared a photo of her and DDG's son to her Instagram with the caption reading, 'even though we're a few days into the new year, the greatest thing that 2023 could have done for me, was bring me my son.. welcome to the world my halo 🥰👼🏽 ✨the world is desperate to know you 😉🤣♥️.' Their son is named Halo, and the internet is loving it Elio Ocean Bonnie Wright shared the news on her Instagram in Sept 2023, saying, 'Say hello to Elio Ocean Wright Lococo 🩵 born at home on Tuesday 19th September. We're all healthy and happy. Andrew and I are so in love with our sun 🌞! So grateful for our birth team that have held our hands throughout and made the journey so joyous and expanding. Birth is the wildest experience…' Hendrix Rouge WWE's Alexa Bliss and Ryan Cabrera have welcomed their baby girl named Hendrix Rouge Cabrera, which they shared via Instagram. X AE A-XII & Exa Dark Sideræl Grimes and ex-partner Elon Musk announced their son's birth in May. His name, X Æ A-12, raised eyebrows — and ended up not being entirely legal in the state of California. So they changed it to X Æ A-Xii, before eventually settling on X AE A-XII Musk. Less than two years later, they annouced the birth of their second child together, a daughter who they named Exa Dark Sideræl. RZA & Riot Rose It took 11 months — and a news outlet obtaining the birth certificate — but in May 2023, the name of Rihanna and A$AP Rocky's son was revealed: RZA Athelston Mayers. RZA (it's pronounced 'Rizza,' FYI) is a nod to rapper RZA (real name: Robert Fitzgerald Diggs) who is leader of the Wu-Tang Clan. And the Athelston part? Well, that's after his dad; Rocky's real name is Rakim Athelaston Mayers. In August 2024, the parents welcomed their second child and kept with the 'R' theme, naming him Riot Rose. Audio Science & Mortimer Sossamon Did you know that actress Shannyn Sossamon gave both of her sons interesting names? She named her first born Audio Science and her second son Mortimer. Pilot Inspektor In 2005, Jason Lee revealed he named one of his sons Pilot Inspektor, which was based on a song from the indie rock band Grandaddy's 2000 album The Sophtware Slump. Rio Dancing with the Stars pros Peta Murgatroyd and Maks Chmerkovskiy welcomed a baby boy in June 2023, who they sweetly named Rio. His middle name is John after Murgatroyd's late father, Derek John, who passed six months before Rio's birth. 'We loved Rio, which we came upon at the last minute. It's a perfect complement to our long surname!' Murgatroyd tells PEOPLE. 'We also wanted something easy to say with [our other son] Shai.' Sky Safir Cornish Colman Jessie J revealed her 1-month-old son's name on June 12, 2023 with a cute photo of the little boy, who she shares with boyfriend Chanan Safir Colman. 'Mans like…Sky Safir Cornish Colman 🐻🌈☁️🌅⚡️☔️🌌,' she wrote on Instagram. The baby shares his middle name 'Safir' and last name 'Colman' with his dad, and 'Cornish' with his mom, whose real name is Jessica Ellen Cornish. But Sky is definitely unique. The name has British roots (and is typically spelled Skye) and is a pretty nature name. Bennett Football star Jason Kelce and his wife Kylie Kelce recently welcomed their third child into the world: a daughter named Bennett. We love the classic and gender-neutral name for the new tot, and it's giving people a lot of inspiration. The two also share two other daughters together named Wyatt and Elliotte. Boomer Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps and his wife Nicole have numerous children together, but their eldest son has the most unique name of the bunch: Boomer Phelps. There's also Beckett, Maverick, and Nico Phelps. Chapel Lee Tennis player John Isner and his wife Madison McKinely revealed that they welcomed their fourth child on Instagram, saying, '4-14-23. Our family got a little bit bigger with the addition of Chapel Lee Isner. The Lord has blessed us in so many ways. @madkool13 you are incredible!💜💙💙💙' Spider Kelly Kay, the girlfriend of late Oregon football star Spencer Webb, recently welcomed their son and, to honor her late boyfriend, she gave their son his nickname in college: Spider, per People. Matilda Carmine On April 1, 2023, Kaley Cuoco announced that she and Tom Pelphrey welcomed their 'little miracle' into the world. She posted a series of photos with the caption, '💓 3-30-23 💓 Introducing, Matilda Carmine Richie Pelphrey, the new light of our lives! We are overjoyed and grateful for this little miracle 💓 Thank you to the doctors , nurses , family and friends who have helped us immensely over the last few days. We are blessed beyond belief 💗 @tommypelphrey didn't think I could fall even more in love with you , but I did 💗.' Aire Webster On Jan 21, Kylie Jenner revealed to the world in a series of Instagram photos that she and her ex Travis Scott have named their son Aire Webster — previously having named him Wolf, but then deciding it just didn't fit. We not only love the uniqueness, but also the natural element tie it has with his older sister Stormi. Patrick 'Bronze' Lavon Mahomes III Born on November 28, 2022, Brittany and Patrick Mahomes' named their first son Patrick 'Bronze' Lavon III. The baby boy's footballer dad explained during an appearance on Audacy's 610 Sports Radio, 'My brother, Jackson, [came up with Bronze's nickname]. We were going with Trey at first because the third obviously and everything like that.' The NFL quarterback continued, 'I started meeting more and more people with the nickname Trey, and Jackson came up to me and was like, 'What about Bronze?' I kind of have the metal thing going with Sterling and all that, and I thought it was a great idea, and I think it's something I'm glad we came up with. I haven't seen anybody else do that… I like it.' Monroe, Moroccan, Golden, Powerful Queen, Rise, Zion, Zillion, Legendary, Onyx, Beautiful Zeppelin, Halo Nick Cannon has eleve living children named Monroe and Moroccan (whose mother is Mariah Carey), Golden, Powerful Queen, and Rise Messiah (with Brittany Bell), Zion, Zillion, and Beautiful Zeppelin (with Abby De La Rosa), Legendary (with Bri Tiesi), and Onyx (with LaNisha Cole). His son Zen, whom Cannon shared with Alyssa Scott, passed away in 2021 after a brain cancer diagnosis; Cannon and Scott also share daughter Halo Marie. North, Saint, Chicago, & Psalm West Estranged couple Kanye West and Kim Kardashian gave their children wonderfully unique names: North, Saint, Chicago, and Psalm. 'When North was born, I know that North West is a very unique name,' Kardashian told LIVE with Kelly and Ryan. 'Well, all my kids' names are very unique, but I didn't name her for maybe three or four days. I looked at her and I said a prayer with her. I was like, 'I pray to God you can handle your name. I hope you are this name that I'm choosing.' I mean, it was really emotional for me.' She added, 'you can't go higher than North.' Meanwhile, Kardashian said of her second born, 'My son Saint, he is a saint. It's like he literally has become his name. He is an angel.' For her youngest children, the couple chose the name Chicago for West's hometown and in Hebrew, Psalm means 'Song' Callum Michael Rebel Kazee & Everly Tatum Jenna Dewan and Steve Kazee's first child together was born in March 2020, and his name tells quite a story. 'Callum: Gaelic for dove because he has been so sweet and peaceful since landing in our arms,' Kazee wrote on Instagram. 'Michael: My middle name.' As for Rebel: 'I wanted a way to honor my mother,' Kazee added. 'Her name was Reba but from a very young age her father called her Rebel. … And so … Callum Michael Rebel Kazee was born.' While Callum's big sis Everly landed quite the fairy-tale-sounding name when she was born back in 2013. Dewan and her former spouse Channing Tatum call her Ev for short. Buddy Dessert Brie Bella welcomed her baby boy in 2020, naming him Buddy after his late grandfather. His middle name? Dessert. 'For his middle name, I really wanted to incorporate my family,' Brie told People. 'I wanted Buddy to have something of my grandmother. Her last name, her maiden name, is Dessert. When you look at it, people are going to say Dessert, because it's French. But it's pronounced 'desert.'' Crew Gaines Joanna and Chip Gaines' fifth child, Crew, was born in 2018, joining siblings Drake, Ella Rose, Duke, and Emmie. Forest Sage, Poet Lake, Bodhi Rain, & Prairie Moon Actress Teresa Palmer and her partner, Mark Webber share four children with nature-inspired names: Forest Sage, Poet Lake, Bodhi Rain, and Prairie Moon. 'Introducing our daughter, Prairie Moon Palmer, who was born just as the sun rose on Tuesday morning, 17th August, surrounded by her siblings who are absolutely enamoured with her. A little magic moon for our family,' Palmer wrote in 2021 after the birth. Calliope Maeve Day Supernatural's Felicia Day was able to keep her pregnancy a secret (only revealing the news at the very end of the first trimester), but once Calliope Maeve was born, she was ready to tell the world. 'She's coming in about three weeks so I guess I should announce this and stuff,' she tweeted with a baby bump pic in 2017. Ray & Jett Ling Song In 2013, journalist Lisa Ling and her husband Dr. Paul Song welcomed a baby girl they named Jett. Three years later, Jett inherited a baby sister named Ray. Olympia, Saint Leo, & Thunder Retired Olympic champion Usain Bolt — who is considered the greatest sprinter of all time — and his partner Kasi Bennett share daughter Olympia Lightning Bolt. The couple also has twin boys, one named Saint Leo, and the other (wait for it): Thunder. Otis & Daisy Sudeikis Former couple Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudeikis named their first child Otis (the little boy was born in 2014) and their daughtrer Daisy Josephine, born in 2016. Wilde has the names of both her children tattooed on her forearms. 'Momma's love,' tattoo artist Dr. Woo captioned an Instagram photo that showed off his work. Luna, Miles, Esti, & Wren Chrissy Teigen and John Legend have chosen some beautiful baby names. They welcomed their daughter, Luna Simone Stephens, into the world in 2016. Luna is the name of the Roman goddess of the moon, and she is big sister to brothers Miles and Wren and sister Esti. River Rose & Remington Kelly Clarkson and her soon-to-be ex-husband Brandon Blackstock's daughter is named River Rose and their son is Remington Alexander. James, Inez, & Betty Reynolds Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds named their daughter James to honor Reynolds' father, who died in 2015, one year after the birth of his grandchild. 'In the spectrum of weird celebrity baby names, I feel like we're not really breaking any new ground here,' Reynolds told Good Morning Britain. 'I mean, I didn't call her Summer Squash Meadowlark, or something.' Their daughter Inez was born in 2016, and their daughter Betty in 2019. 'My dad's name was Ernest Brown Jr. but he was known as Ernie Lively,' Lively said in a press release, per Us Weekly. 'He gave up his last name when he married my mom, [Elaine Lively], and any success he, or I, have experienced has been in a name that isn't his. So when I was working hard to build this company, I wanted any success to be in a name that was meaningful to him. Betty was his mom and his sister's name. Also, Ernie would not be the best name for a mixer.' Lively and Reynolds share a fourth child whose name they have not shared. Harper & Gideon Burtka Harris Twins Harper and Gideon, the children of Neil Patrick Harris and husband David Burtka, were named after an old-fashioned internet search. According to Today, the couple wanted names that were easy to spell and were not stereotypical. Finn, Liam, Stella, Hattie, & Beau McDermott Tori Spelling and husband Dean McDermott were creative in their baby name choices: Liam (born in 2007), Stella (2008), Hattie (2011), Finn (2012), and Beau (2017). Before Beau was born, Spelling admitted that choosing a name for their youngest child wouldn't be easy. 'The pressure is on,' she told E! News. 'The names came to us [for] all four of them, so we're hoping the name comes to this one, but we don't know what it is yet.' Hank & Alijah Mary Baskett Former Playboy model Kendra Wilkinson and Hank Baskett named their son Hank (born 2009) and their daughter Alijah (born in 2014). 'I knew I wanted a unisex name [when I was] going through the names,' Wilkinson told People of her daughter's name. 'I ended up going to Sundance [and] I met a driver who was amazing and so kind. He was talking about his daughter who was named Alijah and I knew right then that would be my little girl's name. Mary is for my grandmother — I'm carrying the name on.' Saylor, Camden, & Jaxon Cutler Kristin Cavallari and Jay Cutler named their third child Saylor after meeting a furry friend. 'We picked out this baby girl's name when I was pregnant with our first,' she told the baby registry site Cricket's Circle. 'I met a woman and her dog, and I loved her dog's name. Funny enough, it was the name she had picked out if she had a girl, but she had boys, so she used it for her dog instead. Here we are 3 1/2 years later, and we are going to use that name for our little girl!' The couple also share sons Camden and Jaxon. Bodhi, Journey, & Noah Green Former couple Megan Fox and Brian Austin Green share three sons: Noah, (born in 2012), Bodhi (born in 2014), Journey (2016). Silas & Phineas Timberlake Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel chose a biblical name meaning 'Man of the woods' for their first son Silas, who was born in 2015. The boy's middle name, Randall, honors Timberlake's father and it's also the singer's middle name. The couple's younger son Phineas was born in 2020. His name means 'oracle' in Hebrew. Onyx In 2020, Iggy Azalea (whose real name is Amethyst Amelia Kelly) welcomed her son Onyx with her former partner Playboi Carti. Amethyst and Onyx sound like a perfect pairing! Poet, Jagger, Lyric, & Story Soleil Moon Frye admitted that she and husband Jason Goldberg were under pressure to pick cool baby names, due to her own. 'I love having a unique name,' she told People. 'Also, because it meant so much. I was born in the month of the sun, and there was a song my mom loved and it was, 'I've got the sun in the morning and the moon at night,' and my middle name is Moon.' The actress spoke to the outlet while pregnant with Story and said, 'We're trying to come up with a name, but there's so many crazy, unique names in our household that I gotta really come up with something good, so I'm working on it.' We'd say they did good! Wilde Wolf In 2022, rapper Eve and Maximillion Cooper welcomed their first child together. 'Wilde Wolf Fife Alexander Somers Cooper,' she wrote on Instagram, sharing a photo of the boy. 'Words can't describe this feeling.' Illusia In November 2021, Criss Angel and his wife Shaunyl Benson welcomed their new baby, a girl named Illusia Angelina Sarantakos. The couple already share young sons Johnny Crisstopher and Xristos Yanni. Cosmo Jost Scarlett Johansson and Colin Jost welcomed their first child together in 2021 and the baby's name is so cool: Cosmo. 'Ok ok we had a baby,' the Saturday Night Live star wrote on Instagram after the birth. 'His name is Cosmo. We love him very much. Privacy would be greatly appreciated.' Jost later shared that his mother was first confused by the moniker. 'I don't know if she thought it was kind of like a hippie thing?' he said during an appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers. Over time, however, Jost's mom learned to love it. We do too! Johansson also shares 7-year-old daughter Rose Dorothy with her ex-husband Romain Dauriac. Eureka Muse Knox-Robinson In late 2021, Amanda Knox and boyfriend Christopher Robinson welcomed their first child, a daughter named Eureka Muse. Knox, who in 2015 was acquitted for the murder of her British roomate Meredith Kercher in Italy, announced the birth on Instagram. 'I know that I cannot 100% protect my daughter from the kind of treatment I've suffered, but I'm doing the best I can,' she wrote. 'Which is why this will be the only picture of her I will ever share on social media.' Knox gave thanks to her supporters on she and Robinson's 'journey to parenthood' adding, 'Thank you for believing in us.' George Elizabeth The Handmaid's Tale star Samira Wiley and her wife, Orange Is the New Black writer-producer Lauren Morelli, announced the birth of their daughter George Elizabeth on Mother's Day 2021, though she was actually born on April 11. Though no one would call either first name very original, this is the first time we've seen them combined — and for a girl. George does follow other celebrity daughters with traditional 'boy' names, such as Jessica Simpson's daughter Maxwell and Blake Lively's daughter James. Lyra Antarctica & Jupiter Seaborn Ed Sheeran and Cherry Seaborn welcomed a baby girl in 2020 and named her Lyra, which means 'harp' in Greek. Quite an appropriate musical baby name for Sheeran's daughter. The reasoning behind Antarctica, though? We're not sure! In May 2022, Lyra got a baby sister, Jupiter Seaborn Sheeran. Jupiter means 'Supreme god.' Add 'Seaborn' to that, and you've got a supremely unique name. Olive & Frankie Kopelman Divorced couple Drew Barrymore and Will Kopelman decided on their first daughter's name Olive after reading in a book that she was the size of an olive when the actress was three months pregnant, she told Ellen DeGeneres. Barrymore also revealed to DeGeneres why they chose the name Frankie. 'It was just a name that came to my husband and I a few months before she was born, and we were sort of like, 'I think this is it,'' she said. 'And then we gave ourselves room to change our mind, but we never did. My mother-in-law's maiden name is Franco and I love her so much that it reminds me of her as well.' Lux & Senna The Bachelor stars Arie Luyendyk, Jr. and Lauren Burnham Luyendyk welcomed a set of twins in June 2021: son Lux (derived from Latin meaning 'light') and daughter Senna, whose name is of Arabic origin meaning 'brightness.' They also share daughter Alessi, whose Greek-rooted name is derived from Alexis, meaning 'defender.' Blue Ivy, Rumi, & Sir Beyoncé and Jay Z's eldest child is Blue Ivy, who was born in 2012. While her parents haven't publicly explained why they chose this name, Beyoncé once posted an excerpt from the book of essays A Field Guide to Getting Lost on which many believe inspired them to select it. When the singer gave birth to twins — one girl and one boy — in 2017, she and Jay-Z named them Rumi and Sir. Wyatt & Dimitri Kutcher Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis named their daughter Wyatt Isabelle, who was born in 2014. The couple came up with the name during a Lakers game, Kutcher once told Conan O'Brien. '….and I just started listing off anything and everything that I saw: 'Sign! Truck! Wall! Door!'' he said. 'She [was] like, 'Shut up!' Then I was like, 'I've got a really dumb idea. What about Wyatt?' She goes, 'That's it.'' The actors named their second baby Dimitri Portwood, who was born in 2016. Dimitri is a Russian baby boy name from the Greek Demetrius (the god of farming and fertility) and an obvious nod to Kunis' roots — she was born in Ukraine. Their son's middle name, Portwood, appears to honor Kutcher's stepfather, Mark Portwood. Lula & Sailor Gardner Liv Tyler and her ex-fiancé, Dave Gardner share two children: Lula, who was born in 2016, and Sailor, who was born in 2015. Tyler also shares son Milo, age 17, with her former partner Royston Langdon. Aden & Ariah Housley Former The Real co-host Tamera Mowry chose two awesome names for her children: She named her son Aden, a Hebrew name meaning 'handsome' and her daughter Ariah, a Hebrew name meaning 'lion of God.' Apple & Moses Martin Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow said their children's names, Apple and Moses, were inspired by the Bible. 'When we were first pregnant, her daddy said, 'If it's a girl I think her name should be Apple,'' Paltrow told Oprah Winfrey in 2004. 'It sounded so sweet, and it conjured such a lovely picture for me, you know. Apples are so sweet and they're wholesome, and it's biblical.' Honor, Haven, & Hayes Warren Jessica Alba and Cash Warren put thought into their children's names. Honor, who was born in 2008, has noble undertones while Haven, born in 2011, was chosen because the girl was delivered inside her amniotic sac. 'Cash said, 'She was born in her safe haven,'' Alba told People. 'And so there we had it.' Hayes, the couple's son who was born in 2017, has a name with English origins, according to BabyNames, which means 'live by the forest.' Jackson, Etta, Goldie, & London Daly Carson Daly and his wife Siri Pinter share four children: Jackson, Etta, Goldie, and London. In 2020, Daly shared with Today the inspiration behind Goldie's name: 'We had a short list of names that we liked, but nothing was sticking its neck out,' he said. 'And I thought about it, you know, this is our fourth kid. She seems like the pot of gold at the end of our family rainbow.' Briar Rose Former couple Rachel Bilson and Hayden Christensen chose Briar Rose as their daughter's name because they are huge Disney fans and were inspired by the main character in Sleeping Beauty. Princess Aurora is also known as Briar Rose. Sloane, Colette, & Hugo Haggerty Ben Haggerty, whose stage name is Macklemore, and his wife Tricia Davis named their first daughter Sloane Ava Simone Haggerty. Sloan is a Gaelic name meaning 'warrior.' Their other two children are named Colette and Hugo. Jovan, Philomena, Domenica, & Giovanna Daphne Oz and John Jovanovic gave their children the coolest names: Jovan, Philomena, Domenica, and Giovanna. The Good Dish co-host and her husband nicknamed Philomena 'PBJ' (her middle name is Bijou, which means 'jewel' in French). Brooks, Scarlett, & Grey Stuber Model Molly Sims revealed that husband Scott Stuber had several rules in place for naming their son Brooks, who was born in 2012: '[Scott] has four criteria: can a sportscaster announce it properly, how can it be shortened and still look cool, does it mean anything, and is he going to be made fun of in fifth grade,' she told Parade. The couple nicknamed Scarlett, who was born in 2015, 'Spicy' and Grey, born in 2017, was the top name choice of his big brother. Wilder Faison The L Word star Donald Faison has six kids, one of whom is named Wilder. '…It was meant to be,' he told Us Weekly. 'And it is kind of crazy because Wilder means 'wild animal' and her middle name is Frances, and that means 'free.' And so accidentally, we named our kid 'wild and free.'' Faison's other kids are named Rocco, Kobe, Dade, Kaya, and Sean. Rylen Brees Former New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees has four children with his wife, Brittany. It's a tough competition, but our favorite Brees baby name was given to his youngest, Rylen Judith who is a little sibling to Baylen, Bowen and Callen. Marlowe, Major, & Mateo Martino Marlowe Mae is the daughter of actor Eva Amurri and Kyle Martino and the granddaughter of actress Susan Sarandon. When asked by People how she felt about the girl's name, Sarandon responded, 'It's not a vegetable, a city or a place. It's a real name, but it's unusual. I really like it.' Major was born in 2016 and Mateo was born in 2020, amid his parents' divorce. Winnie & Frances Fallon Late-night talk show host Jimmy Fallon and his wife, Nancy Juvonen, welcomed their two daughters into the world just 16 months apart and were given the most darling names: Winnie Rose joined their family in 2013, and Frances Cole came the following year. According to Fallon, Winnie was named after Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire where he proposed to Nancy. 'We were talking about different names. You overthink names — you don't want a name that's been done, but then you don't want something so weird people are like, 'What?!' Winnipesaukee's a little long,' he told TODAY. 'Also she's a 'win' for us.' Reign Disick Kourtney Kardashian always loved the name Reign and had considered it for her firstborn son Mason, who was born in 2009. During her third pregnancy, Kourtney Kardashian was sure she was carrying a girl and planned to name her Rain, which she had almost given her daughter Penelope, who was born in 2012. 'Once I found out I was having a boy, we just changed the spelling again,' Kardashian told People. Reign was born in 2014. Heaven, Hendrix, Kenzo, & Kaori Hart Kevin Hart has four children: Heaven and Hendrix, who she shares with his ex-wife Torrei Hart, and Kenzo and Kaori, who he shares with wife Eniko Hart. Beautiful! Solve the daily Crossword
