Zero to One
Book by Blake Masters and Peter ThielWikipedia
314
MENTIONS
27
EPISODES
25
PODCASTS
Search complete. 314 mentions across 27 episodes found for "Zero to One".
Nov 7, 2026
Saurabh AgrawalHOST
and last question i have actually two last question is about what is one book one person or these are places you draw inspiration for from you are really inspired you keep going back to some people to read about them or
Nilesh PatelGUEST
There is a book called Zero to One.
Nilesh PatelGUEST
It's a
Saurabh AgrawalHOST
very good book.
Myriam FrancoisHOST
A veteran communications advisor to top leaders, including Kamala Harris and Jerry Brown, he's known for his sharp, uncompromising commentary on power and politics.
Myriam FrancoisHOST
Now at the helm of Framelab and The Nerd Reich, Duran is widely recognized as one of the definitive voices exposing Silicon Valley's political footprint and the rise of tech oligarchy, not least in his latest book, The Nerd Reich.
Myriam FrancoisHOST
Gil, welcome to the show.
Gil DuránGUEST
Thanks for having me.
5 MINS LATER
Gil DuránGUEST
And it's so crazy sounding and extreme and unusual that it almost makes them invisible because nobody wants to take it seriously.
Gil DuránGUEST
The only thing I did differently from a lot of other journalists was take it seriously.
Gil DuránGUEST
And that's what led me to writing a five-part series in the New Republic magazine on the rise of this ideology and is what led me to my book deal.
Myriam FrancoisHOST
I mean, your book is called The Nerd Reich.
David SenraHOST
When he starts creating One Piece, it's still ongoing to this day, and he's 51 years old.
David SenraHOST
And so when I read this part of the interview, when he's like, I wanted to do something different, I thought of Peter Thiel's book, Zero to One, which again, if you can summarize it, essentially differentiation is the whole game.
David SenraHOST
Over and over again in that book, Peter will say, do not build an undifferentiated commodity business.
David SenraHOST
He has this great line in there where he says, all happy companies are different.
Andrew SchoryHOST
modify.
Andrew SchoryHOST
Yeah, so, you know, there's a book that's called Zero to One, and it's about startups.
Andrew SchoryHOST
And the effort from going from zero to one is so much more than going from one to X, right? So one to some other number, because there's a pattern, there's a repetition.
Andrew SchoryHOST
It's more about duplicating businesses.
21 MINS LATER
Andrew SchoryHOST
yeah well it changes maybe on the stage of life and
Carole BrownGUEST
and what
Andrew SchoryHOST
fits right and so it's good to be able to to change a little bit so all right outside of the bible what's the most impactful book you've ever read
Leonard BrownGUEST
Mine, I started looking at reading The Hero Two Doors Down.
Daryl DiongGUEST
So I launched Z21 because I saw this gap in the market and I could feel that.
Daryl DiongGUEST
So the company is called Z21 and it's named after Peter Thiel's book called Zero to One.
Daryl DiongGUEST
But looking back, I should have named the company something else because with Z at the start, we almost always rank last at all directories.
Daryl DiongGUEST
So it doesn't work in our favor.
Margherita VolpatoHOST
She is editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and was previously national security editor at the Wall Street Journal.
Margherita VolpatoHOST
Her new book is Valley of Death, How Big Tech is Fueling the Future of War.
Margherita VolpatoHOST
With governments increasingly relying on privately owned satellites, softwares, artificial intelligence, and autonomous systems, we're going to explore why the people who control those systems are not simply contractors.
Margherita VolpatoHOST
They have fortunes, political commitments, and power of their own.
Margherita VolpatoHOST
So the phrase Valley of Death has a life in technology and defense already.
Margherita VolpatoHOST
It describes the gap between a promising prototype versus something that can actually be fielded or be commercially sustainable.
Margherita VolpatoHOST
Why did you pick this as the title for your book? And does it carry any other meanings?
Sharon WeinbergerGUEST
Yeah, so I picked it because it had for me a dual meaning.
Rahul ShivkumarGUEST
Some of these agents had to be built by scratch for each of these customers and deployments did take quite a bit of time.
Rahul ShivkumarGUEST
So four coming in in one week does take up a lot of bandwidth.
Rahul ShivkumarGUEST
Yeah.
Rahul ShivkumarGUEST
I mean, it's a classic,
Rahul ShivkumarGUEST
I think we were happy.
Rahul ShivkumarGUEST
I think it was a very hard business to scale.
Rahul ShivkumarGUEST
And we could probably spend an entire episode talking about should be venture scale and what sorts of business should not be venture scale, right? And I think our previous business probably fell in the sole category of maybe not a venture scale like setup even, let alone like outcome, obviously.
Rahul ShivkumarGUEST
Yeah.
Steven HassanHOST
Please subscribe, like, share to support my work if you like it as much as a lot of my followers do.
Steven HassanHOST
I'm so excited to have with me right now Gil Duran, a journalist whose first book, The Nerd Reich, Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy.
Steven HassanHOST
I read this book.
Steven HassanHOST
I'm like...
Steven HassanHOST
Gil, thank you, buddy.
Steven HassanHOST
You know, I knew a lot of the pieces from my research in the past about test realism and network state and so many other things, but you really did a great job.
Steven HassanHOST
framing it, doing very deep research and such, and it debuted at the number three on the New York Times bestseller list, and as far as I know, it's been on the list for six weeks, or is it still on the list? Are we still cooking?
Gil DuranGUEST
It was on the list for six weeks, but it's still the number four business book, so...
Jonathan PanterHOST
I'm Jonathan Panter, executive editor of the Cogs of War Vertical, brought to you by War on the Rocks and Booz Allen Hamilton.
Jonathan PanterHOST
Today, I'm joined by Sharon Weinberger to discuss her recent book, Valley of Death, How Big Tech is Fueling the Future of War.
Jonathan PanterHOST
Sharon is the editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a role she assumed in August of this year.
Jonathan PanterHOST
She was formerly national security editor at The Wall Street Journal from 2022 to 2026 and has contributed to many publications, including The New York Times, New York Magazine, and The Washington Post.
Jonathan PanterHOST
She's also the author of three other books with incredible titles like A Nuclear Family Vacation, Travels in the World of Atomic Weaponry.
Jonathan PanterHOST
Sharon, thank you for joining Cogs of War.
Sharon WeinbergerGUEST
Hey, thanks for having me.
Sharon WeinbergerGUEST
That's been sort of my sort of Lodestar for probably much of the past 25 years.
Annie AltmanHOST
Listen, I respect that.
Annie AltmanHOST
For a slight joke, though, someone on Twitter once said that because his first book is called Zero to One, that if he wanted to write another book, he could write a book called From One to Two.
Annie AltmanHOST
It's like a little chuckle at least, but I agree.
Annie AltmanHOST
But again, even if it's a horrible book, I'm guessing you would still rather have Peter Thiel putting his time and energy into writing look then into allegedly manufacturing global
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