Introducing A New Chapter for Uncanny Valley

0:00This spring, the Chicago Independent Venue League presents Civil Fest 2026, a celebration of live music and community events across Chicago's independent stages. From April 16th through 25th, experience concerts and special events at venues like Metro, Salt Shed, Talia Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, The Auditorium, Ramova Theater, Beat Kitchen, Chop Shop, and dozens more. From intimate clubs to legendary rooms, all spotlighting the artists and spaces that define our city. Learn more at civlchicago.com. Civil Fest 2026. Your city, your venues, your festival.

0:47Hey Lauren, how's it going? It's going pretty good. How are you? Good. The pool is very nice. It is so nice. Well, the pool itself is really cold, but this hot tub. Even better. Fantastic. Yeah. And just, you know, not a bad work day. Not a bad work day. It's a nice way to end the year. Is it the end of the year already? It really is. How did we get here? Good Lord. I know. I know. But, you know, I think it's a good opportunity for us to float and soak and think about the year that was and look forward to next year. We actually have some big news that we're going to be sharing with people today.

1:25We do. And the birds have some big news, too. The birds are chirping. The birds are in on the pod. What do you call a flock of birds chirping on a podcast? I don't know. The comment section? Should we get going? Yeah, let's do it. All right. This is Wired's Uncanny Valley, a show about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley. Today, Lauren and I are bringing you our last episode of the show as you know it. But don't fret because the show will not be going away. We're going to continue bringing you all of the best of Wired's reporting, analysis, and informed takes of what's happening in Silicon Valley.

2:03But this upcoming year, the show will be entering a new era with our colleagues Brian Barrett, Zoe Schiffer, and Leah Figer as the hosts. We're going to get to hear from them a little bit later. But for now, Lauren and I want to share with you a special round of our Wired and Tired Picks to take you into the holiday season. I'm Michael Colori, Director of Consumer Tech and Culture. And I'm Lauren Good, Senior Correspondent.

2:36okay so we're here in the pool and we are going to reflect on 2025 and talk about what's happening now what's happening in 2026 and we're going to do it as wired and tired and if you know the show or if you know wired as a brand you know that it's like the rubric that we use yes i said rubric This is a tech podcast that we use to sort of talk about the trends that are on the way out and the trends that are on the way in and offer some commentary. I have to say last night, Mike, in preparation for this pool pod, I went on to one of the social media sites and looked up Wired and Tired to see if people were still using this rubric.

3:18Yeah. You know, like as a meme. And it's still a thing. Oh, totally. People still use Wired Tired all the time. And it really warmed my heart. Totally. Yeah. So let's do it. Okay. I have to wipe off my glasses from the steam of the pool so I can see the future. Okay. All right. I'm ready. What does you go first? What is your first wired and tired for this year? Okay. I would say tired is voice-activated AI assistance in, like, hardware, you know? So talking to your watch, talking to your pendant, talking to your smart ring, talking to your glasses. And the thing that is wired going into the future is silent AI assistants.

4:04Wait, okay, let's unpack this a little bit. Because to hear any pundit or person who's on the inside of AI talk about it, like, multimodal and voice agents are the thing, are the future. And you're saying, nope, that's tired. Yes. And instead, explain this. Okay, so I think the big dream at the end of this tunnel of despair that we're in with AI right now is that it's just going to work ambiently. And people have been trying to do this for a long time. Like the term ambient computing has been around for like a decade at this point, at least, right? The idea that you walk into your home and your home just reacts to your presence and does all of the things that you want it to do, right, when you walk in.

4:48without you having to press a button or say a wake word or even tap the side of your glasses and start talking to meta AI or whatever it is. There's no action on your part. It just knows that you're there and it does it. And you do this through a combination of sensors and through location and just ambient awareness so your devices can do the thing that they are guessing that you want done. And I think that we have been on the cusp of that for a long time, and I think we're going to see devices in the new year that are going to allow you to do that, right? There's the big OpenAI mystery project coming that they're co-developing with Johnny Ive and a bunch of other designers.

5:35Meta just poached the two top design people, two of the top design people from Apple to work on new hardware. So I really think that this is the direction that hardware is going. It's not going to be stuff that's just for your body. It's going to be stuff that is for the home and maybe also your body. And I really do think it's going to be ambient. What do you think the potential downside is to that? Privacy. Of course. I think I teed you up nicely for that. Yeah, privacy. That's going to be a tricky one. Okay, so that's my first one. What's your first one? My first wired and tired. Wired, IPOs 2026.

6:13Okay. IPOs. And tired, tech CEOs are no longer our saviors. And they never should have been, really. But yeah. So for IPOs, there are some highly anticipated or rumored initial public offerings that we're kind of expecting to see in 2026. Let's see, we've got Stripe is one. OpenAI, Big one. Anthropic. Notion. Databricks. I've never heard of any of these companies. You've definitely heard of SpaceX. They're all going to IPO? This is just rumors. This is possible. IPOs in 2026 are companies that have signaled intent before to go public, and they obviously haven't done it by the end of this year.

7:00So this would be like a major mega cap liquidity event for tech. It would be huge. We would, I mean, we already know what it's like living in San Francisco amidst the tech millionaires and billionaires. There are going to be so many more newly invented millionaires running around. And then, you know, it'll be interesting to see how people sort of reinvest into the tech economy from that. But these are all companies that have raised so much money in venture capital funding and other types of funding over the past decade or so. And so they have these massive valuations. And it's going to be really interesting to see if that is actually sustainable for them once they go public.

7:40And every quarter, they're reporting their financials, and they better have some truly aggressive revenue strategies in place, I think. And we'll get a closer look as journalists at their financials once they are required to share them. Yeah, that'll be a big day. So, yeah, I think that's going to be really interesting to see and then also see some of the trickle-down effects of that. And then, I mean, tech CEOs really, you know, at the end of the day, they're about selling their products. They're about generating more and more and more users as much as humanly possible. They're greasing the palms of officials in the administration to get whatever deals done they need to get done.

8:24I think for a long time now, we as Wired journalists have known, you know, the way this world works and that even back in the days of, you know, Steve Jobs, we shouldn't necessarily have been putting CEOs up on a pedestal. But I think it's very obvious that we should not be looking to them for any kind of moral guidance at this point. And, you know, we just continue to follow the industry as it is and report on it as it is and not how we would like it to be. I'm snapping my fingers underwater. Let's take a quick break while we get out of the pool, and then we're going to come right back.

9:10This week on the political scene from The New Yorker, Trump's rupture in the world order. Europe caught between two adversarial great powers. That's basically dialing back the clock to not only pre-World War II, but really it's a pre-20th century view of the world. And I would say it's a world of permanent insecurity that we're looking at. Join me, Evan Osnos, and my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser every Friday on The Political Scene, available wherever you get your podcasts.

9:50Okay, we're back in the studio of our San Francisco offices after a fabulous time floating in the pool. It was a lot colder than I expected. Yeah. I don't know why I expected it to be much warmer. It is December. Yeah, you're like, let's book a pool in December. Well, you know what? We said we were going to do it and we had to do it. And there was a hot tub. There was. So we can't complain too much. It all worked out. It all worked out. And right after this, I'm going right back there. I'm retired now. Well, now I think we're ready to introduce the new hosts of Uncanny Valley for the upcoming year.

10:23Brian Barrett, Zoe Schiffer, and Leah Figer. Leah, our fantastic senior editor of Politics, is out this week, but Brian and Zoe are here to say hi. So hi, Brian and Zoe. Hello. Hello. I'm trying not to panic that my best tech culture and many other things reporter just said she was retiring, but I'm here. I'm paying attention. I'm locked in. Thank you. Retirement here in the news. is for just about five minutes and then we're back into it. So don't worry about that. I support that. You've earned it. I just want to talk about the retirement plan, if you will. I missed that because I was thinking about the hot tub and how I can get one.

10:59Ryan is also retired. We're going to be fine, you guys. As soon as I find that hot tub, I'm out. So Zoe, I think a lot of our listeners are already familiar with you from our news episodes. You are our director of business and industry here at Wired and you always have your finger on the pulse of all the comings and goings around Silicon Valley. So something that listeners may not know, however, is that you wrote a book about Silicon Valley, about Elon Musk and his takeover of Twitter. It's called Extremely Hardcore. Tell us the thing that most surprised you about the book while you were reporting it and writing it.

11:34Honestly, that was like the easiest reporting I've ever done in my life in a lot of ways because Elon Musk does so little to get people to remain loyal to him, but he's constantly creating new sources all the time. And people in that story in particular were really willing to talk. So I think I kind of went into the book. I wrote the book and thought like, I guess the rest of my career is like this. I've just like unlocked some incredible code. And then in fact, no, it's much harder now. Did Elon agree to talk to you for the book? He responded once to one of my messages with a crying laughing emoji.

12:09So I would say close friends, comrades. That's... I would say so. I mean, you didn't get the poop emoji. Right. That's an upgrade. I felt like he probably meant to type the poop emoji and then it did crying laughing. But I've heard that it's his most... The crying laughing emoji is his most commonly used emoji. Oh, and haven't the kids said that that one's out now? We're not supposed to be using the crying laughing emoji. Yeah. I use it all the time too. So it's embarrassing. Now, Zoe, I remember earlier this year when we first kicked off the Uncanny Valley podcast and we were talking about Doge's takeover within the government.

12:43And this was just a few weeks before. So we hadn't actually seen what was going to happen yet. You correctly predicted that based on Elon Musk's very chaotic takeover of Twitter, that you thought what would happen within Doge would look similar. How did that turn out? I mean, I do think it turned out similar in a lot of ways. And there's one key difference that I've talked about before, but I'll say it again here. I mean, in terms of the way that he communicated with people, I think there was a lot of similarity, if not like, you know, subject lines of emails that appeared to be directly lifted from the Twitter takeover.

13:16The zero-based budgeting, the kind of idea that you come in, you slash a budget down to zero, and you force the people who work for you to justify every single expense. Like, those things are kind of textbook Elon Musk. But I think that with Twitter and with Elon's other companies, the feedback loop for Elon is pretty small. And that's been beneficial to him because he's a risk taker. He's willing to make decisions on the fly, and then he'll get feedback on those decisions, and he'll pivot again. And you see that work pretty well for him at his companies, at least historically speaking. In government, that feedback loop is a lot longer.

13:50And in fact, I think by the time we're starting to see the true ramifications of a lot of his decisions on Doge, he's already ostensibly taken a step back from that enterprise. And so I think that you're in a really different position if you're making those same, what appear to be rash decisions, but you're not really hearing from people in a timely manner on like what happens as a result of that. So does that mean we can expect your next book to be extremely hardcore inside Elon Musk's doge? Thank you so much for the question. Absolutely not, no. Well, everybody should read your last book either way.

14:27Thank you. I so appreciate that. I agree. Okay, so Zoe, we all know, the person that we may not know as much about is Brian Barrett. He is our executive editor here at Wired. He's been on the show before, but now he's going to be sitting in the host chair. Operates in the shadows. I'm here every time you talk about Peloton. And that's what this podcast will be from now on. Right? I'm looking to sell mine, Brian. Are you interested? No. No, but I hate that I'm the last true believer. So, Brian, you oversee all of our coverage here on Wired.com. And you have oversight into everything that we have cooking every day.

15:05But you have a long career in journalism. You were previously the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo. Oh, and something that many people don't know is that you spent a couple years as a business reporter for a Japanese newspaper. Please tell us about this. That's right. The Yomi Yuri Shimbun. I was a—don't laugh. No, it's serious. I don't know why. You just said it in such a delightful way. It's a delightful paper. At the time, it was the biggest newspaper in the world with a circulation of 14 million. Preemptively, I will say, I don't speak Japanese, and I've never been to Japan. I was in the New York Bureau.

15:40I know. I was in the New York Bureau of this office, and it was very much a reporting job, which I differentiate from a writing job. I did interviews. I did research. I helped my Japanese counterparts prepare for the stories that they were doing. I would write a few stories for the English language edition, but it was really my first job in journalism and a crash course into how to actually stand in front of someone and ask them hard questions and write it down. My favorite detail about your years at the Yomiuri Shinbun is their baseball reporting. Can you please share this with our audience? I can.

16:16So there were maybe, I think there were five Japanese journalists in the New York office. They were each on a three-year rotation. I think those numbers are roughly right. So there's a couple of business reporters, a politics reporter, and then two sports reporters. One of the sports reporters, their only job was to cover Hideki Matsui, a slugger who came over from Japan to play for the New York Yankees. The other sports reporter, their job was everything else.

16:46That's how they broke down. So it's great. And I think in fairness, I think there was another, there was also a reporter following around Ichiro at the same time because they were playing at the same time. But that was how they divided up coverage. And our listeners may not know because Brian, you operate in the shadows as we've established. But you are one of - The shadows of Spine. I write a lot of stories. I've been on this podcast a bunch of times. I don't know. That's the thing about your story writing. You are so fast and so whip smart. I swear just last week when OpenAI announced its deal with Disney, I had woken up on the West Coast and was like getting through the news release still about it.

17:26And then I went to our website and I was like, oh, Brian already has a story up on the website that he's written and is like one of the smartest takes on this whole thing. And that's just, that's standard. That's just what you do. And so I am delighted to see how this translates into a regular podcast format. Oh, thank you, Lauren. I don't know about smartest, but I try to go fast. I think that is from, I was at Gizmodo, which was part of Gawker Media, which is what it was called back then for five or six years. And those were the days of writing, you know, seven or eight stories a day. You always had to be able to find an angle on anything to try to make it interesting.

18:01We don't do that anymore, which is good and healthy, but I do at least the ability to type fast is something that I have taken from that. And then you hopefully pair it with some reporting and some other experience. And we still love a blog here at Wired. We do. Yeah. We do still love a blog. Let's talk about some of the other things that we loved by going through our recommendations. Over the years, Lauren and I have been sharing our recommendations with listeners, talking about the things that we are enjoying this week. So let's go around the room and talk about some of the things that us and our new hosts are enjoying.

18:34Let's start with Zoe. What's your recommendation? Okay, so I read this photo essay. I was catching up on New York Times magazines over the weekend because I have kids. So there's like stacks and stacks of magazines everywhere that I don't actually have time to read when they come out. But I had a little time on Saturday morning. And I looked at this photo essay that the New York Times magazine published back in November about people who have fallen in love with AI chatbots. And I really thought it was like the most empathetic and honest look at this phenomenon that I'd read so far. I feel like a lot of coverage of this issue wants to be empathetic, but it ends up feeling like you're laughing at people or like othering them in some way, because I think to a lot of us, it does sound rather foreign.

19:18And this one really didn't feel like that. I thought that the mom who's in the story in particular looked like someone I would be friends with. Like I totally got her. There were two men in the story. You really like understood their points of view and why these relationships felt really like profound and real to them. So yeah, that's my recommendation. I loved it. Okay, Brian, what about you? Here's my recommendation this week, everybody. Are you ready for it? I'm ready. It's an up and coming band. Yeah, yeah. They're known as Twin Dimensions. They are a little bit psychedelic, a little bit post-punk.

19:51Michael, would you say that's how would that be a good way to describe Twin Dimensions? Sure, yes. Yeah, yeah. So a little bit of a second, a little bit of a post-punk. Their latest EP came out in October. It's worth a listen. You should run out your record needle, if I'm saying that right, on it. Michael, I'm going to check again. And a member of this band is your very own Michael Colore, an up-and-coming musician in the Bay Area. Snaps fingers. Yeah, they're great. It's great music from a great person and I assume the rest of the band also great but I don't know I'm not going to vouch for them I will vouch for Michael Calori go check out Twin Dimensions go listen to Translunar do yourself a favor gift it this holiday season wow by burning a CD of it and giving it to a friend you can download it on Bandcamp well or you can stream it everywhere it's streaming everywhere I love that it's not on Spotify is it on Spotify?

20:47yeah we're everywhere alright yeah we're Translunar on this one That's amazing. Thanks, Brian. Yeah. What do you like about it? What's your favorite song? Name three songs. Oh, no, he didn't. Just off the new album, I would have to say, I enjoy Unwound Inside, Paradise, and Click Clack, but for me, it's careening the lead track off the album that really distills what Twin Dimensions is all about. Now, Brian did say that he types very fast, so I think... My man came in ready to go. I think you've evolved a lot since Stray Stars, the 2021 EP, in ways that I think real Twin Dimensions heads will appreciate.

21:30Yeah, yeah. For all the joking, it is genuinely good music, so please go listen to it. It really is. It's delightful. Brian and Zoe, thank you so much for being here this week, and we look forward to hearing you in the chairs in January. Thank you guys so much for having me. Thank you guys so much. This is great.

21:54How do we maintain a strong defense in a world that's rapidly changing? Join us on Strength in Numbers, a podcast from UVA's National Security Data and Policy Institute. I'm your host, Jennifer Strong. In each episode, we'll take a look at the materials powering today's most advanced technology, how it's being used on the battlefield, and ask how the United States can stay competitive against potential adversaries. Voters should be concerned about all this. We want America to be strong, but we've got to be strong and smart. That's all coming up this season of Strength in Numbers. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.

22:33Well, this must be a Michael Calori fan club day because part of my recommendation, actually both of my recommendations are inspired by you. Oh, no. Well, the first is that you have these cool new boots on. Uh-huh. And they're these Chelsea boots. Yep. They look great. I'm looking at them right now. Thank you. And you got them at the flea market. I did, yeah, for$10. They're Thursdays. Incredible, because they would normally be like, you know, 20 times that. Does that make sense from a math perspective? Yeah, they're$200. Yeah, okay. I got them for$10. I'm like, we can do math, even though we're journalists.

23:07And so my recommendation would be for the new year, maybe try to, you know, be a little more part of the circular economy. Like buy secondhand stuff. Go to your neighbor's groups, right? share freely with neighbors groups, buy nothing groups, all of that. Like just there's so much stuff out there. We don't need all of it. Do you know about the app Lucky Sweater? I do not, but I do now. It's like you can put things that you don't want to wear anymore into the app and trade them with other people who are interested in them. Love it. Yeah. I'm into it. So that would be my first recommendation. And my next recommendation is something that I think is something that maybe not everyone's going to be able to accomplish.

23:46but I would say make a podcast with one of your best friends. Oh, that's great. Because we have had this podcast now for, for me, it's been nearly eight years doing this with you. You've been doing it for a decade. Yeah. We talked about this a little bit earlier. Yeah. And it has been so fun. Even on the weeks when like, you know, sometimes it's not fun to make a thing every single week. Sometimes you have to troubleshoot or something falls through or you're responding and reacting to some really disturbing news in our job quite often. And just being here with you in studio or remotely during a pandemic has just brightened my days.

24:32And I'm so appreciative. Well, thank you, Lauren. So thank you for everything, Snack Fight. Thank you. That's very sweet. I appreciate it. What's your recommendation? Oh, God. Now I just have to say something that's totally rote. No, you don't. You don't have to receive it. It's fine. Oh, my goodness. I was going to recommend the new American Giant zipper hoodie. Nice. Yeah. Because going back to the first year of this podcast was the first year that American Giant put out its hoodie. It's famous hoodie, right, that our friend and colleague Farad Manju over at Slate wrote a story about it and said, this is the greatest hoodie ever made.

25:17And it was like this big hyperbolic, you know, declaration. But it actually was a really good hoodie, and the company sold scads of them. In fact, they've sold a million of them to date. And now they've completely redesigned it. Well, not completely redesigned it, but it just feels much different. It's softer. It fits a little bit looser. and it has all of the same like durability appointments that you have grown to love. If you like this hoodie, if you're one of their fans, it has the double lined hood. It has the elbow patches and it has like the big chunky zipper, but it's just softer and nicer and easier to wear.