Jared, Oriana and Ned discuss Oriana’s choice of topic: Silicon Valley’s misinterpretation and fetishization of Tolkien. Tolkien of course lived in a time where computers were mostly huge rooms containing one machine or two that he doubtless considered little more than another example of why the industrial age didn’t suit his mindset on many fronts. But in the half-century since his death the PC era up through smartphones and TikTok have made the industry one of the biggest and most influential in the world – which is the problem. The issues discussed are hardly limited to them but two of its most well-known and notorious avatars in recent years, Peter Thiel and his protege Palmer Luckey, have among other things named various businesses of questionable use and worth (at best) after characters and terms from Tolkien’s legendarium as part of their general quest to own everything and be everywhere whether one likes it or not. There is, however, the small problem that they think they might be Aragorns when it’s much more accurate to call them Saruman and Wormtongue. What are the roots of Thiel’s own particular worldview in particular, shaped by colonial legacies of the kind that Tolkien himself notably loathed? What are the various poisonous ironies of naming particular businesses after certain Tolkien-derived terms considering their original meaning and what they now represent? Can the Tolkien Estate themselves actually do anything about the use and misuse of such terms to start with? And why in the world did Thiel think that a good choice of quote from Tolkien was in fact a quote from an original Rankin-Bass song instead?