Patti Harrison Grew Up With Tech As Her North Star. Not Anymore

0:00I recently chatted with McKinsey's Dan Swan about how businesses successfully transitioned to AI, the coming agentic wave, and even the sad loss of tennis line judges. Here's a sneak peek. Some people are buying software and calling it a transformation. The people that are really getting the most value from it are fundamentally doing something very different, which is they're taking that technology and they're incorporating it with changing the capabilities of their people, fundamentally redesigning their processes and tracking the impact through the bottom line. There's much more in the full interview with Dan Swan, which can be found in its entirety on Wired.com.

0:37Also, check out McKinsey's playbook, Rewired, available at your favorite bookseller.

0:50From Wired, this is The Big Interview. I'm Katie Drummond, Wired's Global Editorial Director. My guest today is the sensational comedy writer and performer, Patty Harrison. You may know her from her scene-stealing work on Tim Robinson's I Think You Should Leave. I sued the city because I was accidentally sewed into the pants of the big Charlie Brown at the Thanksgiving Day parade. I made all my money off the big Charlie Brown. So don't even come and try and sell me any crap. I don't want that.

1:20Sorry. Sorry. I will get it together. But if you have not seen Patty on that show, it's it's very, very funny. You may also know Patti as Ruthie on Hulu's Shrill, or from her various appearances on The Tonight Show and Jimmy Kimmel. But what you probably don't know, which I didn't know until recently, is that Patti Harrison is a Wired subscriber. Good for us. Good for her. This month, we are putting out a concept issue of Wired called Wired Women. And when we decided on that for September, we obviously knew we needed a woman to put on the cover. Patti immediately came to mind. She's hilarious, a great actor, and I can't stress enough how much she nailed the assignment.

2:01So much so that in the end, we didn't just put her on one cover, we put her on four of them. I'm a little bit biased, but if you have not seen these covers, I highly suggest you check them out. They're incredible. And I am here talking to Patti remotely today. She's been in London for a sold-out run of her new one-woman show called Just Ironing Some Things Out, which by the time you hear this interview, she'll have also performed at Edinburgh's Fringe Fest. Welcome, Patti. Hey, thank you. You are so funny and you are often very, and I mean this as a compliment, just like conventionally funny. You've talked before about feeling that sort of pressure to incorporate politics into your work and how you don't necessarily want to, right?

2:47And it doesn't necessarily have to be about being a trans woman. Maybe it's about organizing for democratic socialism. Maybe it's about the genocide in Gaza. Just because those things are part of you or part of what you value or important to you, it doesn't mean that your comedy has to be about those things. You've also talked, though, about how those things can't really be separated. How do you think about drawing that line or knowing where that line is? Yeah, I think there's a balance. Personally, when I started doing comedy in New York, I was working at a restaurant and I was not that long out of coming out as transgender.

3:30and it was my first time living alone in the city and I was dealing with a lot of agoraphobia essentially and just like had a really hard time commuting and being out in public and adjusting to society, trying to like have a sense of normalcy, trying not to feel afraid, sort of entering or exiting any room that I'm going into. And I think when I was working at this restaurant and dealing with that stuff, I started doing comedy bits that were about anything but that because I think doing comedy at that time for me was an escape and it was a place for me to just explore any other sort of ideas outside of my daily strife and sort of my identity prison of that society has kind of like pushed upon me.

4:27and I don't think that's exclusive to transgender people I think a lot of people are like that but I think you know I think I felt a bit resentful after the first kind of big moment comedic for my like comedy career was a bit that I did on the Tonight Show that I was brought on to do by two of my very good friends, Joe Firestone and Mike Desenzo, who are brilliant comedy writers. They're both cis for the record, for the fucking record. Am I allowed to cuss? Cis men. You cuss all you want. Well, Joe is actually female. Cis men and women. Yeah. But she's taken that male ass name back. Watch out.

5:18Sorry, Joe. The Joe community. um but uh they brought me on uh to address the trump military ban that was happening at that time where he was banning trans people in the military uh etc etc i think after that moment a lot of the opportunities that i was approached for what was to speak on uh politics and like be sort of like a representative in a way for transgender people that said i have never felt that i was the right person to uh kind of be speaking explicitly about those things but i uh i think when you live a um uh an intrinsically politicized life your your life experience is political.

6:17Everyone's life experience is political. Like I don't think people can separate morals from politics it's the same thing and I think comedy is sat in your understanding of the truth of the world and how you either speak on that or you subvert that and so even by making the choice to make a bunch of comedy that's about anything other than what's happening in the world in and of itself is political because it's a reaction to wanting to escape from a reality that is like uh giving you existential dread yeah it's a choice it's a choice I mean there is so much right now that just isn't funny um how do you gesture to those sort of more horrific realities of the news when there's no punchline.

7:10I, yeah, I think a large part of that is to do with the fact that we have conflated our news intake with social media, which I think is horrific. Like, I think those two should be separate. I remember when Twitter was like comedy, it was just people tweeting. And then when they integrated the like the news like ticker or whatever, like being a part of it, I think it created this really toxic sort of dynamic of incentivizing people to have really inflammatory political takes to get shares or retweets or whatever to get shares. Grandma's entered the chat. but yeah I think like people want to be shocking in their humor and I think I'm one of those people like I've always been drawn to shock humor and I think it's just because of like the way I was brought up and the way that my childhood played out but and and you can read all about that in my book that I'm also pushing today that is sponsored by DARPA, which is so awesome that they gave me the money to self-publish this book.

8:31I guess it's not self-published if DARPA's publishing it, but they're doing a lot of amazing work. It's published by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, which I actually used to cover as a reporter. I didn't know that you were deeply connected to DARPA. Yeah, and APAC. I take money from both, but I use it in fun, creative ways. It's a full I had no idea they were publishing books over there. It's a residency. Yeah. I just have I'm allowed to write about sort of my transgender journey, finding my womanhood and also why we need to keep investing in robotics that are able to scan faces instantly, that are able to fly at 80 miles an hour, take a 90 degree turn instantly.

9:14kind of why they need to be able to carry like a human amount of weight, why they need to be able to grab someone like from under a bed, why they have to have that sort of like prehensile grip and why those things are necessary. And also like my first time wearing makeup. And autonomous killing. Yeah, well, I don't want to say too much. Don't spoil. Okay, don't spoil it. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back.

9:46AI is everywhere in the workplace, but which companies are really making it work? That's the question at the heart of Rewired, McKinsey's playbook for winning with technology and AI. When you think about it from a company or a CEO perspective, it's actually not any harder than it is when you've done any transformation in the past, right? You've got to go and understand what's the opportunity, how much is it worth, what's the investment required to get there, and is it going to be important for me to transform my business in that regard? But a lot of people don't actually go through that process of then understanding what are those two or three areas and then making the hard call.

10:23Sometimes it's actually more difficult to say we're not doing four through six than it is to say we are doing one through three. There's much more in the full interview with Dan Swan, which can be found in its entirety on Wired.com. Also, check out McKinsey's playbook, Rewired, available at your favorite bookseller.

10:46I am curious. You've talked a little bit so far about social media, about Instagram. What is your relationship to social media now? You were kicked off Twitter early in its downswing, if I may call it that. I think 2021, you impersonated Nilla Wafers. Is that how you pronounce the name of that cookie company? Yeah. Okay. So you impersonated the Nilla Wafer cookie company? Show some respect. I'm so sorry. On the name. I don't know where those cookies are from. I'm Canadian. They might maybe weren't a thing when I was growing up. I checked and, you know, Donald Trump was was unbanned from Twitter.

11:24I think Kanye West was unbanned when Elon Musk bought the company and renamed it X. I went and looked up your account. I believe you are still banned. Yeah. Yeah. I think that social media as we have it is is hell. I think it is a it's like truly the most literal panopticon. We were bugs trapped under a little glass and it's self. It's hard because I think the frustration is that there's there's multiple frustrations. One is that we all see that this is evil, but I think the other layers of that is we are also conditioned to attack each other individually instead of attacking the systemic issues, the larger problems, which is that they are clinically testing these features to make sure that people become addicted.

12:33And I think people are embarrassed to admit that they're addicted to Instagram or their phones or they'll say it in a jokey way. But I do think it is – I think it's a systemic thing. I think these companies are really in a very like standardly evil way doing things they know will affect us in the negative, in the whole to make money and to keep people trapped in – it's it's like it's very similar to like alcohol and cigarettes and like it's in like the dumbest way and i have had a really hard time with that because of um just being a comedian and needing feeling the need for instagram to promote shows and like keep people in the know and i've been booked I've gotten jobs like on TV shows because of stuff that I the way I was posting online jokes I was making online and that's how I got into um like acting and uh I so I do personally have this sense of like oh no if I if I delete this this will end my income this will end I'll be forgotten or something.

14:02And I think it's really designed to make you feel that way, which is insidious. Well, yeah, I mean, there's an entire global economy running through these platforms. And that was something I was curious about is to what extent do you feel like Instagram in particular, you just have to be there? I mean, I think I read that Tim Robinson found you on Instagram and thought you were hilarious, right? And so there was sort of this meaningful professional opportunity that came up as a result of your presence there. And yet you speak so clearly. You really do speak clearly about the ills of these platforms.

14:39Yeah. But you work in entertainment, right? So how do you separate yourself from that? And can you? Well, I definitely think in a very short amount of time, too, social media has changed significantly. I think the social media that I had when I was in middle school and high school, which was Zanga and MySpace. What is Zanga? Zanga is like LiveJournal. Okay, I had a LiveJournal. It was a blogging site where you could like you could get like an HTML. If you were good at it, you could make like your background a picture you pulled from an image search and you can change the colors. You can literally change the colors of the font.

15:24Hell yes. Yeah. I loved Sangha. And that was like as a middle schooler, that was the first place I was writing stuff as a joke, like writing joke posts about my fake day. I would have in school where I'm like, oh my God, Mariah Carey came into school today and she was singing and it was so good. The principal, like this is a bad example. It's a bad example. Because that actually did happen to me. Wait, did it actually? No. This is risky with me because I am very gullible, which is a really bad trait for a journalist. I will keep that in mind to manipulate you later in life, but not right now in this moment.

16:04Okay. So Mariah Carey was not singing at your school. She was not. Okay. I read or I read. I listened to an audio book. I feel weird saying I read a book if I listened to the audio book. But I and I might butcher the title, but I believe it's called 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Okay. By Jaron Lanier. I don't know how to say his name. Yes. No. Jaron Lanier. Jaron Lanier. I made him French because I am French.

16:37But he wrote this like very short, succinct book that I think came out in like 2018. And he's a really brilliant technologist. I mean, this is someone who has worked in Silicon Valley for a long time. So I think the fact that that book came from him says a lot. I don't know. When we edit this, we'll make sure we both sound smart about Jaron. Okay. Jaron Lanier. Um, he, uh, I listened to this book and I really agreed with a lot of his framing of, uh, of social media in like an, uh, in a, um, subjective way. And like, but also in like the, the purest sense, which is social media, and I believe this social media at its core is not an evil thing.

17:31Social media is a tool for connection. the when I was on my space when I was in high school and I was in rural Ohio and was so limited in what I had access to culturally and like in the completely in the closet having no language about queerness like having the internet and having my space was amazing I found so like so many different bands and alternative music and like alternative people and I think it really They helped me find communities outside of where I lived, where there weren't people who liked the things that I liked. And I wasn't being bludgeoned with five million ads at that time.

18:17So, yeah. Sorry. All right. Another quick break. We'll be right back.

18:25AI is everywhere in the workplace, but which companies are really making it work? That's the question at the heart of Rewired, McKinsey's playbook for winning with technology and AI. When you think about it from a company or a CEO perspective, it's actually not any harder than it is when you've done any transformation in the past, right? You've got to go and understand what's the opportunity, how much is it worth, what's the investment required to get there, and is it going to be important for me to transform my business in that regard? But a lot of people don't actually go through that process of then understanding what are those two or three areas and then making the hard call.

19:02Sometimes it's actually more difficult to say we're not doing four through six than it is to say we are doing one through three. There's much more in the full interview with Dan Swan, which can be found in its entirety on Wired.com. Also, check out McKinsey's playbook, Rewired, available at your favorite bookseller.

19:24And I mean, when we first talked, when we talked about you doing these covers, I remember you saying that you grew up looking at sort of wired, but at the technology industry more broadly and thinking like, this is amazing. And these people are doing amazing things and are going to like save the world and change things for the better. And that you have obviously over the years and decades, not to age you too much, over the years become very much disillusioned with that notion and disappointed and angry. And I think that so many people share that view. I mean, certainly at Wired, that is a view that we share.

20:04And that's sort of how the publication has changed in recent years. I guess I'm just curious about your evolution through that. Can you talk a little bit more about that, sort of what your interest was in technology when you were younger and how it's changed? I just as a kid I was obsessed with sci-fi and fantasy and was really excited about this future where there would be artificial intelligence and there would be self-driving cars and there would be robot animals walking amongst us how cool would that be but then there's the disillusionment that comes with realizing that capitalism will sour everything once it like capitalism reveals grifters these companies when they are uh when they're developing these robotics that have the potential to really hurt people they profess that they're uh they promise these aren't going to be used in combat this is just for the sake of like progress and society and like we see them using these rob these robotics this tech this ai tech these robot dogs in gaza we see them experimenting with this tech like in combat situations combat i feel is is a generous way to put it like considering it is a full-on genocide um and i can't uh i don't have a way to reconcile that at this point because it does it makes you lose faith in this community that i have always seen to be as intrinsically progressive because like robotics is futurism.

22:06It's science. It's progressive by nature. And I feel like we used to have good social media. We used to have social media without ads, without algorithms. We saw things chronologically. it's things that like in in moderation are good for your brain you can learn you can go to a website you can learn about something that's niched to your interest you can go to a cooking website get a recipe not be hit with like a bunch of ads for cal she because you want to make a fucking cannellini bean salad i want to talk to you about ai are there things that that scare you about it creatively and and artistically i mean does it come up in the context of of your work i uh i wonder i think like what's interesting is i've read on instagram the you can like read an ai summary of your posts if you like go up and click on it and ai will summarize sort of like what is happening in like a paragraph and it is so scarily accurate to like being able to recognize like irony and like nuances and humor and little details and photos that I've posted that are there through this real through in my opinion I'm like there is a lot of irony or there's like sarcasm or there's different textures but there's like levels of earnestness I think in terms of my work I think it's if I if I'm online it's inevitable that it will absorb it I have had the most fun in my career doing live shows and being in a room with an audience.

23:52And that's a lot of the shows that I do. I don't record them into a special and I do them for like a year and then I move on to the next show and I like start to rebuild again. And that show doesn't live on video. I don't have a lot of clips out. Is that intentional? I don't feel like without a context that my jokes really work in like a one minute clip i think a lot of what i like to do is build tension over like an hour so like there's things that wouldn't be funny by themselves that are are funny because the of the like atmosphere that's been built over the past 45 minutes and but i do think that as long as people will come and be in a space and gather uh to see something like real and feel the energy in the room that there is a certain level of safety to that unless we have like ai hologram comedians that people come to see which i'm sure has been already been like on the table like come see george carlin's ai like come talk to george carlin's hologram yeah i'm curious about your comedy in all of this in the context of of ai slop and and what's happened to the internet and the this blurry line between what's true and what's not true have you felt like you've needed to change your approach to comedy because people have such a hard time telling what's true and what's not true does that stress you out in the context of the way you approach your comedy uh I think it's interesting it makes me sad for people it makes me sad that I I think people are victims having reactions to the stress that has been intentionally caused upon them to keep them engaged on whatever they're looking at uh I posted the other day from from our shoot I had like a MAGA hat oh I saw this dark MAGA hat I was so excited when I saw and I posted a picture it's like a thirst trap it's like me and my bra my tits are out and I have this hat on but I was joking in the caption I put like it's like a Carrie Underwood song about Jesus and I was like saying that I was I'm finally glad to be coming out and like getting away from a community that is so judgmental meaning like queer people and then I'm like at liberals and I'm like coming out as MAGA or something as a joke and I thought that was very clear but like because of algorithms it's interesting like pre-algorithms um i felt like my social media was a my page uh was a place where people who were following me were there because they sought me out or they saw something i did and they understood it and they liked my work um and so it was more it was more facilitated and if I posted something I could post stuff within the context of them understanding my point of view about it and like getting it and knowing it's a joke and I think with algorithms kind of taking over you get so much more random harassment because your stuff your posts are completely taken out of context and thrown into other people's feeds and thrown into like people who it's designed to agitate them.

27:22Like the algorithms know this person is not going to like this and they're very likely to post about it, this image. And so then what that turns into is like, I'm getting harassment for a joke that I made, which I thought the people who followed me would get. And I knew completely that it was edgelordy and that I was shitposting and rage baiting And so I'm not saying like, oh, I'm a victim or anything like I just thought the response is because people were responding really angrily who were progressive. Like people were like, how could you how could how could you be trans and post something like this?

28:06And you really think that community is going to save you unfollowing or something? No, I was like, so these are people who maybe because of the algorithm, they might have followed me for one thing. and they don't see my posts really because of, you know, it just gets buried because I don't post a lot. I don't, I think, keep up in the way that it wants you to to incentivize it. But like, I just thought it was really interesting that these people's cortisol levels are spiked when they see this image that they didn't want to see. And I'm like, if you took the time you took to type the comment and post it and then unfollow me, And instead you just like looked at my page or like did a quick scroll or like searched me and like read like a smidge of my Wikipedia.

28:54You would see that I'm like trans or that I'm progressive and that I'm like, you know, I joke around a lot ironically. And it's definitely changed the model to which a lot of comedians, I think, play their jokes online. And I think online culture can have an effect in the real world and the way humor is. I think it's really absurd, the idea that in order for a joke to be OK, it has to exist in a vacuum without context. We talk about this at Wired a fair bit. It's like impossible to have fun on the Internet anymore because someone is always so mad at you. Like someone is always so mad at Wired for the smallest little thing, for a joke or something we think is clever or trying to be provocative.

29:41And we get in a lot of trouble online. I mean, there's just there's this humorlessness to so much of it that is really a bummer, at least in my experience. Yeah. And I I've had so many posts of mine taken down because like for old posts, like when they started using AI to comb through people's posts, I had so many posts flagged that were like this was this post was taken down for bullying and abuse. And it was a post where I'm talking. I like am at my friend's comedy show who did like an hour and I'm like this bitch just like tore it up like this bitch just had an amazing show. But because I called her a bitch, it was saying that I was like bullying her.

30:26And then when I tried to repeal it, it wouldn't take it. It wouldn't like reinstate the post. And then it was like, if you keep doing this, your account will be suspended. And I was like, so where's the line of free speech that people are commenting, like, in my Instagram, calling me a man, like, implying that I should kill myself. And I'm reporting these comments. And then I get the message back that's like, these comments did not actually go against community guidelines. So it's like, so what is the line? What is the ever moving line for freedom of speech in this context? and like i just don't think we should be there anymore like no matter what side of the political spectrum you're on like it is it is completely destroying your nervous system and your sense of security about you like it makes you see people in such a like bad faith pov like i'm i'm not omitted from that there's been times where i've like ranted online and i'm like about something i saw and i'm like why am i it's like about some actor on a movie being rude to a pa and i'm like why am i right now writing this long about this thing and i'm like maybe i should sit this one out and i think it is just like the i'm like addicted to my phone so i'm speaking from that bias but But it's weird, the cognitive dissonance of if you like step away from your phone and see all the things that have been normalized so quickly and all the behaviors and how you carry that out into the world.

32:08There's a lot of progressives who like knew that didn't have to get to that point to know that those things were bad and we shouldn't be like promoting them. But there are people who like their mind is changed once they're touched by something or they are more open to conversation than we write them off as if we're like viewing them as a one kind one shade of person because of what we see on social media. And I think it's designed that way. I think it's designed to keep us all like separated. It's that like trademark fascist sort of divide and conquer. and I am feeling so hopeful about this rise in like class consciousness, this like peaking interest in socialism.

32:54Like it's so exciting. That is like the one I'm like so. Well, that's a great place to end. Holding on to it. I want to ask, you are our wired woman. You're on these four covers. I can't wait to see how people react to them. I'm sure the reaction will be interesting. But pay it forward for us. Is there a woman out there who inspires you? Who is Patty Harrison's Wired Woman? No, I'm going to slam the door behind me, and then I'm going to build another pane on the glass ceiling, just make it a lot thicker. There we go. Patty, thank you. Thank you for being here. And thank you. Thank you for doing our covers.

33:32Yeah, of course. When do I get paid? Let's talk about that after. Okay. It's$4 million, by the way.

33:47The Big Interview is produced by Lina Misitsis. Our executive producer is Kate Osborne. This episode was mixed by James Yost. Our theme music is by Pran Bandy. It was fact-checked by Matt Giles. And I am, of course, your host, Katie Drummond, Wired's Global Editorial Director. Check back here on Thursday for the latest episode of Uncanny Valley, where Wired's writers and editors add you to their Slack channel.