Is Silicon Valley Still the Tech Capital?

21:40Katie Drummond:And like, what an unfortunate vindication. Like, I wish we weren't doing this. I wish that we had more time to cover cool science. But like, guess what? Right. Like, we have other fish to fry right now. We wish Doge didn't happen, but it did. I mean, come on. You know, yes. But Biden was in denial of the fact that technology is politics. And now, I mean, I just think of that insight as as profound as the founding inside of Wired, as I said. Like, technology is culture, and now technology is politics. Like, it is so exciting to be at a publication that feels like it's both trying to reinvent itself but stay true to its original mission, which was always to root for the future.

22:18And I think that's exactly what we're doing by covering this. We're rooting for a future that is technological but could be better. Okay, that's a good place to take a break. We'll come right back.

22:39On Masters of Scale, iconic leaders reveal how they've beaten the odds.

22:44Katie Drummond:Asking really strong questions is a superpower. You want to show up with something radically different and how they've grown companies to incredible heights. The greatest rewards always come from the greatest risks. That's Hit the Gas. Airbnb, Zillow, Microsoft, Liquid Death, and more. Hear from the founders who've changed the game. It's anything but business as usual. Find Masters of Scale on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever else you get podcasts.

23:18Welcome back to Uncanny Valley, a live show that we hosted in partnership with KQED earlier this month. What are the lessons of this previous era of tech, of the 2010s era of tech that we've talked about? that you would hope that these stewards of AI now would learn from and actually consider, as this is, as Jack put it, just sort of infiltrating every area of our lives? Well, yeah.

23:44Katie Drummond:I mean, this is an obvious answer, but I think the very clear parallel to me is the hazards and harms of social media. It's that these companies created this technology, They created these platforms. They created these businesses, these behemoths. Users adopted those systems and those norms and that way of life. And not enough care was taken by the companies, by the users, by regulators, lawmakers. Very little care was taken. And, like, look at where that left us. And when I think about AI being layered on top of that mess, that there will not be adequate care taken with how that technology is commercialized and deployed and regulated, that is an unacceptable outcome for me as a human being, as a parent.

24:39Katie Drummond:it cannot happen. And yet we are now living in a country with an administration who basically just said, go for it. That's what we're looking at. And so to me, the lesson is take great care, take great care. And of course, I worry that that is not happening. We're watching in real time as it does not happen. And I think for the tech press, I think a lot of lessons have been learned by journalists around how they covered that moment in time as like this great democratizing force, as this revolution of social media, I do believe that those same mistakes are not being repeated. I think there is a lot of critical coverage of AI.

25:23Katie Drummond:I think there's a lot of like very bad coverage, whether very optimistic or also just like very dystopian in a way that I think is unhelpful. But I think for everyone involved, whether you're a journalist or a tech executive or a regulator, it's like everyone needs to take great care and think about what this world will look like in 10 years if we don't spend more time on this the way we did with social media. That's what I think. Jason, what do you think? I mean, I, of course, agree. It just doesn't have to be as dramatic as people want it to be. I'm kind of sick of being asked for a smart take on AI, something insightful or contrarian.

26:02because I just sort of increasingly feel like the smartest thing you can say about it is that there isn't really anything that smart to say about it. I mean, most of my friends and family, thank God, are neither journalists nor techies, and their relationship to AI is either jokey and gimmicky or painfully, agonizingly boring. And I don't see, at least in my life, cause to either freak out or scream from the rooftop. So Katie said there's dystopian coverage and utopian coverage. And I don't know. I remember the tech last years at Wired. That was back to, I think, one of your first questions, Lauren, like 2017, 2018.

26:40And I remember at the time thinking, the world is turning on technology. It is now my job as a Wired editor to remind them how to love it again, how to care about it, how to root for it. So at least for me personally, that's what I spent those years working on. And I don't know, in this time, I don't want to recommit to something like that, but I do want to remind people that it only feeds these CEOs when we freak out about their technology because then they feel that much more powerful.

27:10Katie Drummond:No, it sounds very boring to say like middle of the road, but you think about like education. Yeah, regulate it. Could be a complete disaster. Could also be like a really effective, useful, interesting tool. You know what I mean? Like, there's a boringness to being like, we're not going to be extremist and alarmist, but we're also not going to publish press releases. But I think the smartest, most nuanced journalism that we can do, like, lives in that area. I tend to feel that the people who are making the sort of most dire, you know, prognostications about it, it's kind of self-aggrandizing. Like, if you're saying, like, oh, what's going to happen when we achieve AGI, embedded in that is, well, we're going to be the ones to achieve AGI.

27:48Oh, I'm not even thinking about AGI.

27:49Katie Drummond:Like, what are we even talking about? Right. You're not AGI maxing? You're not getting ready? This is why I don't live in San Francisco. I'm like, what does that mean? That's what they were all doing at the bar before. What does that mean, guys? That's crazy. What are you talking about? But when you're here, what does it feel like? Does it feel like you're in the middle of it all? Or are you like, what? No, no. So I'm actually staying in this area I've never stayed in before called Mission Bay, which is like a fake neighborhood of like, sorry, of like all new condos that like could be hotels, but aren't, but like basically are hotels.

28:23Katie Drummond:There's like the sweet green, there's the proper foods, there's the grocery store, very clean sidewalks, lots of boutique fitness, and like a lot of people who look very bored. And it's sort of like, this is where you go if you're like an associate to mid-level worker at a tech company, and this is like your safe space. Like that's the energy I'm getting. And there are other parts of San Francisco that I love that are like, that's like the San Francisco that's eclectic and weird and creative. Like that's San Francisco to me. I don't know where I'm staying, but like, it's not, it ain't it. Where I'm staying is like the worst stereotype of what San Francisco has become.

29:01Katie Drummond:That's what it's like. Do you work at Salesforce? Do you work at Salesforce? Like what? Like that's where I'm staying. Yeah. There's a homogeneity and everything kind of looks like an Apple store. And everyone is in a boutique fitness class and they're all wearing athleisure all the time. But New York's kind of like, parts of New York are like that now too. Parts of every city. Miami, Boston. I don't know guys, San Francisco and the boutique fitness and the sweet green, like there's something happening there and it's not healthy. I don't like it. I feel like your boss, Anna Wintour, would be horrified by the fashion there, by the fashion here.

29:32Katie Drummond:She would not cast a gaze. Yes. No. One quick thing I did want to ask you, we didn't want to do predictions because we feel like predictions tend to be bad generally. But if there's a story that has run on Wired so far this year in the magazine that you feel like you're just kind of obsessed with, it's stuck in your brain, and you feel like it gestures towards something in the future, like towards a story that is not going to go away. Why are you laughing? Just because my answer is so, such a bummer. Sorry. I wish I had a happy one. I was thinking about this earlier. We published two, we have, I will say like many people who work at Wired are the best people in the world.

30:09Katie Drummond:Among them are our security team, who are the best security reporters. I would put them up against anyone. They would kick their asses. They published two great stories this year. One was a guide to protecting your digital privacy when you're traveling through airports, when you're crossing borders. The other one was just about protecting your digital privacy like full stop. Did phenomenally well. Every time we re-promote them, they do phenomenally well. It's evergreen-ish service journalism, right? But obviously publishing it now for certain reasons. And when I was thinking about like, well, what wired stories will continue to have resonance for the next several years?

30:47Katie Drummond:And what will become sort of an ongoing story of this era? Like it's those, unfortunately. It is wired as a place where you can find genuine expertise around protecting yourself from all of the risks that maybe as Americans and people living in the United States, you felt less vulnerable to historically, that you should now be paying attention to. So probably those. Excellent. There's also a guide to protest as part of that too, which I have to flag. My turn. I think I have to pick a story I published literally last week. The title is The Baby Died, Whose Fault Is It? And it's an incredible story.

31:27It is about a venture capitalist who hired a surrogate. The surrogate lost the baby. It was still born. And the venture capitalist went after her with everything she has. And it works on a number of levels, one of which is the fact that surrogacy as an industry is totally unregulated. So this story, though it might seem exceptional when you read it, and it will, is probably not. It's probably happening a lot. And then it just plays into this larger, freakish obsession the Valley has with fertility. I'm sure many of you have heard of these pronatalists who think that population growth is do or die.

32:06So, yeah, I think if I were starting out as a tech journalist right now, I think fertility might even be my beat. I think it's so fraught and weird and complicated.

32:15Katie Drummond:It's not too late. Yes. It's not too late, Jason. Make me a reporter. Yes. Send me in. Excellent. Okay. We're going to take another break and we'll come right back.

32:32Hi, I'm Nicole Phelps, the Global Fashion News and Features Director and co-host of Vogue's podcast, The Run-Through. Each week on the show, our listeners get an all-access pass to the world of Vogue with the latest fashion news and the most exciting voices in the industry. On Tuesdays, join me to hear interviews with influential leaders in the industry like Calvin Klein, Daniel Roseberry, and Jonathan Anderson. On Thursdays, join Head of Editorial Content at Vogue, Chloe Mal, and Head of Editorial Content at British Vogue, Chomenadi, as they explore style and culture through the lens of fashion with guests like Martha Stewart, Kamala Harris, and Tracee Ellis Ross.

33:10The Run Through with Vogue, new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

33:21Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. Should we play a little game? Yeah, let's do it. I got it. Let's do it. Okay.

33:27Katie Drummond:Katie, go first. Oh, okay. Okay, control. I would control meta. I would take over the entire company. I would turn it off. That's delete. That's delete. No, no, no. And then I would fix it, and then I would turn it back on. But it's like, let's do it right, guys. I'm going to turn it off, and then I'm going to turn it back on. Okay. Control. Excellent. I love that idea. Alter. I would alter my Apple Watch to make it easier to indicate to the watch that I am taking a rest day or that I'm on a long flight and I will not be meeting my fitness goals today. And I really need it to stop shaming me because it's, it's like, this is, there is like a genuine, I stopped using this for like a year because I was like, this is toxic.

34:10Katie Drummond:This is like, I'm sorry. I can't stand up right now. Like it's, so I would alter the Apple Watch. I know there are ways that you can do it, but it's too hard. You need to be able to be like, rest day, not going for a run. Thank you. Technology in service of like a better human experience. That is what we should be aiming for. And then what would I delete? I would get rid of iPads used by children. I don't know how I would do it, but my child had an iPad for like a year and it was the scare. It was, and I'm very like, screen time, you go, you watch iCarly, like you do whatever you want, girl. But it was the scariest, as a parent, the scariest thing to watch your kid get home from school and like just like a iPad and then lean back.

34:57Katie Drummond:And it's just YouTube kids for hours. Like it is, it was genuinely scary. So I would get rid of iPads used by children. I don't know how to do that, but that's what I would do. Thank you. Jason? Okay. Control. I control self-driving cars because I - That's not the point. Well, I just want them everywhere. Make me the universal driver. I'm an excellent driver. I just want them on every road in America. Oh, I see. Okay. So we're upping the volume. We're just putting them, yeah, they can't come soon enough. Alt. I would alter the personality of AI. I think we went very wrong when we decided to give it a personality that wasn't, you know, just like C-3PO neurotic butler bot, which is what I would institute, by the way, universally.

35:49They are only C-3PO's. And then I'm going to delete global positioning satellites, I think. You can't have self-driving by deleting them. We'll figure that out. How are you going to do that? Fine. I specifically delete Google Maps, which I think has ruined lives. What? My mother, for instance, used to be one of the world's great navigators and now can't grocery shop without, like, plugging it in.

36:14Katie Drummond:Interestingly, did you know I don't know north, south, east, west? I know up, down, right, left. Oh, does that... Because you're in the map. You're like, I'm going up. But the sun, don't you... No, I can't do it. I don't know. And I was reading recently that you would think that would alleviate anxiety when you have a GPS in your car, but it actually replaces the anxiety with something called, like, spatial anxiety. So these things that we think are helping us are actually causing or widening our potential to be anxious. Just get rid of it. No more Google Maps. Fair enough. Lauren, what's yours?

36:46I'm surprised you both didn't say this because I was like, everyone's going to say this. I would control ChatGPT. I mean, I would control OpenAI. Like you would be behind it? Like I would be Sam Altman.

36:58Katie Drummond:Have fun. I mean, I think I could do a good job. No, you'd be great. All right, I'm going across the street afterwards, just taking over his office. There you go. He's probably still there working. Alt, I debated this a little bit, but today was an Apple product launch day. New iPhones, better cameras, happens every year. I would make the front-facing cameras worse as I get older. Like, why do we want front-facing cameras to be so high resolution? With every passing year, the resolution gets like 10 % worse. Obviously, that should be the thing that happens. And then delete, I would delete meta threads because I just hate threads.

37:40Threads is just such a bad Twitter. I still call it Twitter. It should still be Twitter in my mind. It will always be pre-2022. But it's such a bad Twitter copycat. And meta has totally used the power of its already massive network to just row people into using it. And I think that the incentive there is like, and of course, like I know that Adam Mosseri and Mark Zuckerberg are often on threads talking about the product changes that they're making and they're listening to users and stuff. But I just, I find it to be such a, like an empty calorie experience when I get sucked into threads. And I wish it was as good as Twitter used to be.

38:16But yeah, I would delete threads. You don't need threads. So that's my answer. That was really fun, guys. That was fun. I think we're going to audience Q &A for a few quick questions. Yes. Thank you so much. I heard today on the radio, this is the radio, that there's already been a study as to the huge, and it's revealed a huge disparity between male and female use of AI, chat-ypt, globally. And that totally terrified me. Women just don't use it as much as men do. How do you feel about that study? Yeah, I mean, I'm not familiar with this study. I will say, so I did a Q &A with an author a few years ago named Caroline Criado Perez, and she'd written a book called Invisible Women.

39:02You're nodding, so you must know it. And it was about all the ways that our society, products, but also transportation systems and towns are designed mostly with men in mind. And it was kind of a fascinating eye-opener. And as new technologies come out now, I tend to look at them through the lens of like, okay, who's designing this? What biases may exist in that design process? Are there little things that appear here that maybe make it less friendly, user-wise, for certain populations? And so I guess I wonder if there could be something about that, maybe certain apps or certain products that are actually catering a little bit less to women or other groups.

39:45But otherwise, it doesn't sound like a good thing. Like, it sounds like if this is, if AI is the thing that ultimately is going to be infiltrating every aspect of our lives and affecting the way that we work and the way we communicate, there maybe should and would be more women users of the technology. At the same time, maybe that just means we're all going to be like living in the same bunker taking over the world because we're going to be like AI immune. I don't know.

40:07Katie Drummond:It's interesting. I mean, Wired's audience now is actually a little bit more women than men. Is that true? I didn't know that. It is true. Just the touch. But even the fact that it would be 50-50, I think is surprising for a lot of people. So that's interesting because it tells us something about who's reading and they're choosing to read Wired and what they're interested in. But I do think that like in general, women feel less empowered to try new technology. I do still think there is like a gender gap in not tech literacy, but in comfort, comfortability around trying new technology. I mean, even in my own marriage, my husband is like an extremely avid early adopter of AI.

40:46Katie Drummond:Again, this is like survey sample one. Whereas I have been much more like tiptoeing around it and he's out there making like five minute movies, you know. And it is just interesting like observationally that I think that is the case. I think men tend to jump much more quickly into trying new tech than women, even though as we know from Wired, women are reading, They're reading about it. So that's interesting and actually gives us a good vein to dig into for reporting. Another fun little anecdote. I recently did a story about Vibe coding for Wired. And I embedded with an engineering team at Notion.

41:20And two of the leaders of the engineering team were both women, of the AI engineering team specifically. And I ended up pair programming with women throughout the day as well. And so I was like, this is pretty cool to see that it was a good mix. The only thing I would add is that we had a former editor, a woman, who said not long ago that the only reason men care about and invented AI is because they can't get pregnant. What? Yes. Katrina.

41:48Katie Drummond:They want to generate content? Or life or something. Oh, dear. Yes. I don't know what to make of it. I'm just putting that out there. Whatever pitch that was, we didn't publish it. And then I later heard Megan Smith said that once to me. Oh, did she? And she said it was one of the Wired editors who first said that. And I was like, here we go. I kind of buy it, I have to say. We'll argue about that later. Yes. Hello, my name is Byron Perry. I'm a founder of a new publication here in San Francisco called Gazetteer in San Francisco. You guys recently published some stories that were written by AI and did a full mea culpa on that.

42:29I didn't actually read that yet, so I would just love to hear how that happened. And what are you going to do to prevent something like that happening again? And what were the sort of incentives and workflows that allowed that to happen?

42:42Katie Drummond:Yeah, I'll take that. So just to be clear, we published one story that we subsequently, in the weeks that followed, determined independently had been pitched by a writer who did not exist. And the actual contents of the article, it was a very innocuous piece. It was like a gaming story. And the actual substance of the piece was AI generated. It was not accurate. And the way we think about this internally, and I genuinely mean this. This is not me trying to sort of like evade accountability. We take full responsibility for publishing the piece. As soon as we realized what had happened, we retracted the story.

43:21Katie Drummond:We put up an editor's note. We subsequently published a piece explaining to our audience what had happened. If it can happen to Wired, it can happen to anyone. And that is what was so scary about it, is that we get hundreds of pitches every week. We are constantly evaluating new freelance pitches. We have editors who are commissioning those ideas. Our editor got a very normal pitch from a Gmail address. This writer had other clips that had been published in other outlets. It was a great idea, almost as if it had been tailor-made for Wired by ChatGPT. It was a fantastic pitch. The writer commissioned it, got a draft, was a good draft, went back and forth with edits with the writer, published the story.

44:05Katie Drummond:We have a fantastic fact-checking team at Wired. We have a fantastic legal team. But not every story that we publish goes through that fact-checking process, right? Like that is reserved for a certain set of stories. And not every story runs through a full fact check. So the editor published the story. and it was only when it came to payment after the story had gone up that we realized you want to be paid how? And it was not a conventional ask. And at that point we did a little bit, we did some sleuthing and realized like, ah, okay, this is a problem in terms of what we are going to do moving forward.

44:41Katie Drummond:And again, what I, what I say is so scary about that is that most newsrooms, like Wired has a fact-checking team. Most news organizations and magazines in the year 2025 exactly what you're talking about, budgets dwindling, do not, right? If it could happen to us, it could happen to anyone, whether it's text, whether it's video, whether it's AI-generated images. That is a very, very scary thing in the world of journalism and in the world of an internet that is full of accurate information and accurate content. That worries me a great deal. In terms of how we're going to handle it moving forward, we've implemented new processes where essentially any first-time writer for Wired or first-time commission for Wired will go through a rigorous mandatory fact-checking process, which I actually think solves a significant or, you know, like, sort of resolves this to 99.9%.

45:32Katie Drummond:Like, you're not getting in the door with Wired unless our fact-checking team has assessed both you and your background and the piece that you filed. So that's sort of what we've done to safeguard against it. But it was not only sort of like a learning moment for us, But I think for every brand under the Condé Nast umbrella to sort of say like, whoa, okay, we got to think about how we're doing things. Because again, this happened to us. It happened to many other publications. And it could happen tomorrow to somebody else. So that's a little bit of insight for you. One more quick question. I think we have time for it.

46:07As Wired seems to cover more politics, and it seems like Silicon Valley is kind of becoming close to Washington, I was wondering if you have any hopes for the future of technology and government.

46:18Katie Drummond:I mean, absolutely. And I think that it is Wired's job always to be in service of optimism. And I think to what Jason said earlier, sort of like rooting for the future. Like we want a better future. Like that is what we are driving for. And I think when you think about sort of government and the government bureaucracy, like one of the things that was so interesting about Doge was that this kind of haphazard, rushed, messy approach to, you know, stripping out the bureaucracy, to introducing new technology, to fixing really outdated systems within federal agencies, like, was a lot of that right idea, wrong implementation?

46:53Katie Drummond:Like, for sure. I mean, I think that what they were getting at in a lot of those situations was, this is 40 years old, and nobody has updated this, and this is running on code that is, like, from the Stone Age, correct. Does that need to be addressed? Absolutely. Did they handle it in a way that is in the best interest of federal employees, of civil servants, and of the American people? I would argue no. And we're seeing now a lot of that work being undone. But do I have hope for technology to create a more effective government bureaucracy, if that's your question? And I'll let these guys chime in too.

47:29Katie Drummond:Like, absolutely. I think that what we are seeing now is not the manifestation of that that I think is in service of the better future that we all want. I agree with that. You know, I think throughout the past several months, what people tend to focus on, of course, is like the age of the people who were infiltrating the U.S. government and whether or not they were qualified. Some of the unsavory nicknames that some of those federal workers, you know, federal workers. Yeah, big balls. Yeah. It became kind of a fun game to see how many wired editors would go on live TV to do like hits about the topic.

48:03And then the chiron underneath them would say like big balls, blah, blah, blah. So it was some, yeah, fun screenshots. But, you know, we all sort of glommed on to some of the more, you know, the highlights of what was going on inside of Doge. And I think ultimately what Katie said is correct is that the intent may have been well-meaning, but the way it was implemented was really concerning. And the problem is that some of the changes that have been made will take years, if not decades, to recover from, both for the federal government and for the American people. And so I want to have hope and I want to have optimism that maybe at some point we'll sort of get things back on track.

48:45Some days are harder than others with regards to that. My contribution is somewhat stupid, but I think friction is kind of cool again. I mean, like for years and years, tech sold us this idea that frictionlessness was cool. And I think we all kind of nodded along thinking like, yeah, like streamline things, make it easier. But, you know, as any physicist would tell you, we couldn't sit on the stage without friction. You can't walk without friction. And I think people want to work at stuff again. They don't want everything to be easy. So I don't know. I just have hope that the next generation will be reminded that even if it means like working to find cool culture on the internet, which now actually does take work because we are drowning in slop, there's just going to be a renewed interest in putting in the work.

49:32So this phase will pass and then people will remember that the world just works better with friction. So that's my kind of somewhat philosophical response. I think we'll end it on that. There you go. Friction. Yeah, I just want to say thanks so much. I want to give a little shout out to our producers in particular, Kate Osborne and Adriana Tapa, who have put so much work into making this live show happen. And our friends at KQED, Ryan Paloma, and everyone else, thank you so much. And thank you to everyone for joining us tonight on stage. We really, really appreciate your support and coming out late on a Tuesday.

50:06and if you want to continue to support Wired, subscribe to Wired and support KQED. So thank you so much. Thank you, everybody. Thank you.

50:18Thanks for listening to Uncanny Valley. If you like what you heard today, make sure to follow our show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. If you'd like to get in touch with us with any questions, comments, or show suggestions, you can write to us at uncannyvalleyatwired.com. Our live show is produced by Adriana Tapia, Kate Osborne, Jessica Alpert, and Sam Egan. Special thanks to Ryan Davis at KQED and their event production crew. Amar Lal at Macrosound mixed this episode. Mark Leida is our San Francisco studio engineer. Kate Osborne is our executive producer. Katie Drummond is Wired's global editorial director.

51:00And Chris Bannon is Connie Nast's head of global audio.

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