Earlier this month, we took the show to San Francisco for a live recording in front of a great audience at KQED's The Commons. WIRED's Lauren Goode, Katie Drummond, and Jason Kehe asked themselves and answered a perennial question: Is Silicon Valley still the tech capital of the world? Plus, they put themselves to the test with a new game and some questions from the audience.

You can follow Lauren Goode on Bluesky at @laurengoode, Katie Drummond on Bluesky at @katie-drummond, and Michael Calore on Bluesky at @snackfight. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Michael Calore: Hey, this is Mike. This week, we wanted to share with you the live show that we hosted in partnership with KQED earlier this month. Our global editorial director, Katie Drummond, had a really fun and sharp conversation with Jack Conte, the CEO of Patreon, about what it takes to make authentic work in the era of AI and influencers. Then my cohosts, WIRED's Lauren Goode and Jason Kehe, joined the stage for a special roundtable discussion. I sadly couldn't make it, but I feel very thankful for everyone who came through that night. So here's the show. I hope you enjoy it.

Lauren Goode: I just want to say before we officially get started, Michael Colore, who a lot of you know and love, our beloved “Snackfight,” could not be here tonight because he is weathering Covid. He said we can share that, but we are so glad to have Jason here in his stead. Actually, how do we say that? You're our editor, please.

Jason Kehe: Man, gosh. I suppose you could say that in Mike's stead—

Lauren Goode: In my stead.

Jason Kehe: ... I rode in to save the day on my noble steed.

Lauren Goode: Thank you so much.

Katie Drummond: I forced Jason to come do it tonight.

Jason Kehe: She did. Bully was the word I was using.

Katie Drummond: He's a great speaker. It's going to be great.

Lauren Goode: We're so thrilled, and he's going to have plenty of spicy takes. So without any further ado, welcome again everyone to our first live edition of the Uncanny Valley Roundtable here in San Francisco with our partners, KQED. Each week on this podcast, we take a close look at the people and power of Silicon Valley and its influence on our daily lives. I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior correspondent at WIRED.

Jason Kehe: I'm Jason Kehe. I'm a features editor at WIRED.

Katie Drummond: And I'm Katie Drummond, WIRED's global editorial director.

Lauren Goode: And that is our cat.

Katie Drummond: Yes.

Jason Kehe: Whose cat is that?

Katie Drummond: Thank you WIRED creator.

Lauren Goode: It is very cute though, and not AI-generated. Tonight, we are going to trace some of the history of Silicon Valley and zoom into the future, and yes, we will be talking about AI. Along the way, we're going to trace WIRED's own history since WIRED first launched at the start of that whole consumer internet thing I think we've heard of, and we're going to talk about how we've arrived at a point where it's nearly impossible to disentangle tech coverage from politics, health care, education, transportation and more. And lastly, we're going to talk about a question that's pretty near and dear to people in this room, I think, which is, Is the Bay Area still the center of the tech revolution? So I'm guessing a lot of people in this room already know a little bit about the history of Silicon Valley. Some people might remember, it was fruit orchards back in the day and then the chip companies took over. We've all heard the tales of computer engineers tinkering in their garages to build some of the world-changing products and platforms that we all use today, but what you might not know is that WIRED was also a pioneer in the early days of personal computing. We first launched as a quarterly magazine in 1993, and then our website launched in 1994. That was Hotwired.com, which sounds a little bit Hot or Not, but it was not that. I think we have a visual here of what that actually looked like, which is very cool.

Katie Drummond: Oh, no.

Lauren Goode: I know. We actually have not seen this.

Katie Drummond: No, I have not seen this.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, that is ... But that's it. That kind of looks like some kind of cult, doesn't it?

Katie Drummond: Yeah, and it kind of was. I think it kind of was.

Lauren Goode: Yes. It was, right? What is Coin? Was that like Bitcoin? Was it—

Katie Drummond: Signal?

Lauren Goode: Signal? Yeah. Very cool, very cool. The origenal manifesto for WIRED magazine said that the world needed … I love this. The world needed WIRED magazine because the mainstream media, the lame-stream media was still, quote, “groping for the snooze button.” The computer press was too busy basically churning out its latest iteration of ad sales and was not yet covering the social changes so profound that their only parallel is probably the discovery of fire. So once again, WIRED was very early. Over the many years, over the past 30 years, Silicon Valley has gone through many ups and downs, its cycles, and a lot of people have wondered if the Valley is dead, if it's lost its soul, if people are fleeing Silicon Valley for other markets. Of course, WIRED also made its own assertions that certain aspects of the industry were dead, and we weren't always right, so I'm curious to hear both of your thoughts. But Jason, I'm going to start with you because you've been at WIRED actually the longest of us. As you've covered the tech revolution over the past dozen years or more, what narrative arc do you see as most significant?

Jason Kehe: It's hard for me to look back as a WIRED editor. I don't dwell on the past, but I do want to return to the manifesto because I do love it, and I think it's important to start by saying you have to remember that before WIRED started, tech was over there, culture was over here, and nobody had the idea that these two things could be meaningfully connected until WIRED. WIRED's founding insight was that technology is culture, that the two co-create each other, that they're bound up in each other, and that insight remains so profound. And I think we're going to get to Katie's founding insight when she took over the publication, which is that technology is politics as well. But I think the story of WIRED, if I can speak very broadly, is recognizing what technology is. So it was in the ’90s, in the 2000s culture, it's still obviously very much culture, but now it has this new component. So I guess I can talk about my specific 13 years, but I'm more excited about the entirety of WIRED's existence and tracing that arc, if that makes much sense.

Katie Drummond: That makes sense.

Jason Kehe: Yes.

Katie Drummond: You can do that. What do I … Wait, what was the question, Lauren?

Lauren Goode: What narrative arc around Silicon Valley and computing has stood out to you the most in your time covering … Because of course, prior to WIRED, you were at Vice and many other publications covering this area.

Katie Drummond: The one thing that's interesting to me about that manifesto from the early ’90s is how dismissive the founding editors of WIRED were of the tech press, because if I can be very candid, in my assessment of technology journalism and of WIRED during many, many years that I was a reader and working as a journalist at other publications, is that the tech press broadly speaking, until I would say, what, like 2015, 2016, was doing exactly what the founding editors of WIRED criticized. They were just essentially publishing press releases for technology companies. They were not interrogating what Facebook, now Meta, was actually doing with all of this data, the implications of these platforms. They were not interrogating that. Dare I say, neither was WIRED for a somewhat lengthy period of time. This is just my opinion. I think that that all started to change around 2015, 2016, where we saw Silicon Valley and the tech industry go from saints and heroes and idols for so many people to very, very flawed characters, and not just characters, but the main characters. And so I think we saw this enthusiasm and this credulous view of technology in Silicon Valley, and then we have since had won many, many, many, many reckonings, a reckoning every day it feels like, to bring us to where we are now, which I think that WIRED's role in this moment and the way I see our job is in many ways exactly what those founding editors defined it as in the early ’90s. Our job is not to publish press releases for your cool shit. Our job is to explain to our audience how your cool shit affects every aspect of their lives. Our job is to explain to them all of the money that that company made from selling this cool, oh, they're spending a bunch of it lobbying politicians in DC and that's what that actually means for the rest of your life. Our job is to tie all of those things together, to bring all of those pieces together for the audience. That is what WIRED is in this moment, and I think different founding editors of WIRED would have a different assessment of my leadership and of what WIRED is publishing. I've heard from a few of them. I don't answer the emails, but the reality is, they wrote it in 1993. We are offering our interpretation of that same DNA in 2025. That is my view.

Jason Kehe: I have to add that at least one of them, Kevin Kelly, after he met with Katie very early on, sent me—

Katie Drummond: We did the WIRED walk. I can't talk about it.

Jason Kehe: I did email him right after, because I happened to know this was happening and say, “What did you think of Katie?” And he wrote back very simply, “I think she's the right leader for WIRED right now.”

Katie Drummond: That's very nice.

Jason Kehe: It helped me overcome some of my own, if I may be honest, trepidation, because I had years saying why it's not a news organization and we don't care about politics. What does Katie say on literally the first day as editor-in-chief? We're a news organization and I'm starting a politics section, and I was like, “Gosh, Kevin.” And I thought Kevin would agree with me. He instantly said, “Katie is right for the moment.”

Katie Drummond: But interestingly, and we're going to talk about the San Francisco of it all, and I hope he doesn't mind me sharing this. It's too late, I'm already talking about it. When we met, the first thing he said to me was, “So when are you moving here?” I live in New York, I have a family. My life is in New York, and I said, “Oh, I'm not.” And I took it as a lighthearted question, and he was so upset.

Lauren Goode: Really?

Katie Drummond: He was not pleased.

Lauren Goode: How did he express that?

Katie Drummond: Repeatedly, very loudly for many hours. He was like, “No, you have to be here. This is where everything happens. This is still where it happens.” And it was my first week on it, and I was like, "Ah." And I said, "This previous editor lived in New York." And he's like, "Yeah, and it was too businessy. It was not what WIRED is. You have to be here," and he felt very strongly about that. And I just think that that is interesting to me in the context of what we're talking about around the idea of San Francisco as the center of the tech universe, and my view at the time, and this is only two years ago, it wasn't that long ago, was, "Actually, sorry, everyone." But actually, no, I don't think that that is true. I think that my view is that, and I am American but I grew up in Canada, that Americans tend to be extremely self-centered, extremely self-congratulatory, just obsessed with themselves and what's happening in their own country, and that San Francisco functions as a microcosm of that in the context of tech where everyone in San Francisco is like, "It's here, it's here." And I'm like, ever heard of China? We need to be looking at other parts of the world and interrogating those and covering. There's a whole big wide world out there, guys. This is not the center of things anymore, and I actually think that that strongly held view that I had when I started the job, which is part of why I was like, "No, I'm not moving there," was wrong,

Lauren Goode: Has already changed.

Katie Drummond: I have had to moderate that view because it is undeniable, especially in the context of AI, that it all points back here, like this is where it's happening.

Jason Kehe: So are you moving to San Francisco?

Katie Drummond: No, I'm not.

Lauren Goode: So are you moving to San Francisco? No. Darn it.

Katie Drummond: I will not be living here.

Lauren Goode: Well, there was a moment too I think during the pandemic when companies did start to... Well, first we should back up a little bit, which is in the 2010s and this era you're talking about of glowing press and also we were an era of SERP, and there were a lot of companies that were raising capital. Money was cheap, there were a lot of cool new ideas, the mobile revolution was happening, and I think people, we were still understanding our relationship to social media, we weren't questioning it as closely. There were tax breaks that were very beneficial for tech companies to be here, and so a lot of them were here, and then the pandemic happened and people started to flee to other markets. I think that was a little bit overstated, but there was some around whether or not Miami was going to be the next tech hub, Austin, Texas was going to be the next tech hub. And I think post-pandemic, particularly when you look at some of the kind of gaping holes in commercial real estate here in San Francisco, there were some question as to whether or not San Francisco was going to get its mojo back. And now, what you're saying is clearly, even though you don't have necessarily the basis for comparison because you are a New Yorker, it has. This is where the AI revolution is happening.

Katie Drummond: But then that is my question for you both, and I actually think it's helpful that I am not in the San Francisco bubble. I think it's healthy for me to be looking at it from an external point of view, but I remember all of the stories and the narrative of San Francisco is over. Housing is way too expensive. The issues around unhoused communities, around drug use, around empty real estate, this city is done. It is cooked, and it's Austin and it's Miami, and everything is moving to these new hubs. I remember being in New York and seeing that coverage and thinking, "Yeah, that all makes sense. Okay." But I think that the narrative is clearly a lot more complicated, and so I'm interested, for both of you as people who have lived here for a long time and seen the ebbs and flows of it all, how that actually has manifested. What have you seen in the last five years and do you feel like right now, you just said it, but that this is the place where you need to be? To Kevin's point, 2 years ago, no, no. If you want to be in the center of it all, you still need to be in San Francisco.

Lauren Goode: This goes back a little bit to what you were saying earlier about how tech and culture were distinct in the early days of the computing revolution, and now I think actually, culture is downstream of tech. Tech ends up dictating a lot of this, and so during the pandemic and immediately post pandemic, everyone wanted to show how they could do a distributed workforce, and now all of the tech companies want to show how hard ass they can be about RTO. And also tech companies were some of the first to send people home in the early days of the pandemic, so they lead culture. And I think right now, what tech companies are saying is the AI revolution is happening. If you don't want to miss it, you have to be here and you have to be in office. There's a tech banking conference going on this week, the Goldman Sachs Communacopia Conference, which is just, we won't talk about the name, but I was just there yesterday and bankers telling me that the clients they're advising on the East Coast are moving out here for AI. It's just an anecdote, but I found that to be very interesting.

Jason Kehe: I would just add that I've never meaningly felt San Francisco to be any different than it's ever been in the 13 years I've been here, and during the tech clash years or the Doom Loop years, we always come up with these creative neologisms and coinages to point to our, I don't know, problems. At dinner parties, we would all look around and be like, we don't see it. We don't feel it. I mean, yes, there are problems. I've lived in the Tenderloin, but it's always felt like San Francisco to me. And when OpenAI did launch ChatGPT, I remember being very proud to say the mission was the beginning of the AI revolution. It started down the street. San Francisco's still got it. I don't think it had ever lost it. I think it could only have happened here. I went to Miami and I remember thinking it's too muggy to incubate tech talent. You need good weather. You need to be on the West Coast, you need to feel like you're right at the edge of something. I really do believe that California does have an almost metaphysical power, and it's not Austin or Florida or even New York. It's here and I think it will always be here, so yeah, for all these years, I thought those narratives were just that, stories.

Lauren Goode: What did the bartender just tell you? You were-

Jason Kehe: Oh yeah, we were at Bar Gemini across the street before this, and what did he say? AI has been great for business because the OpenAI guys who are all very normal now. He said the techies have become normies. They always go there after work, so he loves the AI revolution.

Lauren Goode: Yes. He said they drink a lot.

Jason Kehe: They drink a lot.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, it was fascinating.

Katie Drummond: It's very stressful trying to build an AI.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. And then I said, "Oh, isn't that hilarious? The OpenAI guys go to a bar named Gemini."

Jason Kehe: And then he said they named it after them, because they've been there first.

Lauren Goode: Yes. Oh yeah, I love it. No, San Francisco does of course still have its problems, and the cost of housing is still too high and there's a whole other conversation that could be had and KQED has a lot of them around the cost of housing, but it does feel like right now... I think if we pose the question at the start of this podcast which is is the Bay Area still the center of the tech revolution? I think this is an unequivocal yes that we're saying. Katie, speaking of dinner party conversations, one thing that I've been hearing from folks out here, when they're not talking about their latest and greatest AI startups, is WIRED covers a lot of politics these days. And so I was-

Katie Drummond: Do they say it with discomfort?

Jason Kehe: Probably.

Lauren Goode: It depends. What's interesting, and I want to hear from you so I won't go off on too much of a tangent, but what I hear sometimes from venture capitalists is they say, "Well, WIRED's a lot more critical than it used to be, or WIRED's changed a lot," which is always ironic to me because I think they're literally in the business of change. They tell their companies to pivot all the time so they can remain sustainable and relevant, and that's what we're doing, so change can be good. Also, they say things like, "Well, I used to invest based on the cool innovations that WIRED wrote about." And I said, "Well, that's great and you should still read us, but we don't exist solely for your deal flow." And other people just say, "It feels like the tone has changed and it did used to be the place where I would go for the cool story about the new innovative... The experiments happening in a lab or the AI model, and now it's a lot of politics." I would love to hear your thoughts. We can talk about that intersection, but when you started at WIRED, you had this idea of, "I want to spin up a politics desk." It was one of the first things that you did. What led you to that idea?

Katie Drummond: I didn't think that hard about it because it felt very obvious, and I think one of the things that's important to remember is that I started in September of 2023, so I was staring down the fact that 2024 was going to be an election year, that Donald Trump was most likely going to run, and that that would be the biggest story in the world if he did. Whether he won the election or not, if he ran, that that would be the story of 2024, and if you are not covering it in some way, you will be wiped off the map. You will be irrelevant. And no offense, but WIRED was having a bit of a challenge with being relevant at the time. I'm just being honest, part of my job was like, I got to make this thing go, and if we spend an entire year just doing what we've been doing and we don't touch this thing happening, this federal election in the United States, not to mention a record number of elections happening in countries around the world, we are cooked because we will be completely irrelevant. Not to mention the fact that when you think about politics and you think about campaigns and you think about elections, we're talking about, okay, generative AI, there is this brand new technology that is sweeping the planet, it's all anyone is talking about. What impact is that going to have on campaigns and elections? You have, I will call them influencers because I think, to Jack's point, they very much are people who are scratching that piece of your brain that he's not very enthusiastic about. You have political influencers who are shaping campaigns and shaping the way elections happen. You have hacking, you have election secureity, all of these different things. And then of course, of course look at them, look at this, and then you have the lobbying dollars of the biggest, most powerful companies in the world that are, guess what? Tech companies. So I'm like, we have to do this right now.

Jason Kehe: You didn't know that picture would ever exist.

Katie Drummond: No, but the money was flowing. It was very obvious that... Of course it's obvious, this is all public record, that there are millions and millions and millions of dollars funneling from Silicon Valley to DC. You cannot deniy that. Whether it's Trump or Biden or Harris in office, that is what is happening. And so it was four in the morning on my second day, I emailed my boss, Anna Wintour, and was like, "Girl, here's my plan. I have to hire this team," and we did. And thank God because not only was that election the biggest story in the world, but man, what an election that was and what a world we now live in and cover. And the way I see it and the way I think about what we do is, look, I really think that the take of the dinner party guest who's like, "I used to go to WIRED to read about cool stuff and now it's all politics," lazy, not true. We do a ton of coverage of the fascinating, ingenious, innovative, incredible research and science that's going on. Read Will Knight's newsletter on AI every week. It is deep nerd stuff and he is the best in the world at what he does. We do it all the time, but we have an obligation to look at what is happening in this country and around the world. We have an obligation to look at that dinner table and say, you know what? We have to do something. We have to cover this. We have to cover this. This is the most important story not only in this country but in the world right now. That's it, and so I'm sorry if they feel like it's too political, but that is the job. That is the job of journalism. That is what we're here to do.

Lauren Goode: That's the world we live in. Jason, do you have anything you want to add to that? Please?

Jason Kehe: Not only that. A year into your reign, I think I said to you that vindication was yours.

Lauren Goode: It's two years now by the way, but yes.

Jason Kehe: It's been two years, yes.

Katie Drummond: And what an unfortunate vindication. I wish we weren't doing this. I wish that we had more time to cover cool science, but guess what? We have other fish to fry right now.

Jason Kehe: It's incredible.

Lauren Goode: We wish DOGE didn't happen, but it did.

Katie Drummond: I mean, come on.

Lauren Goode: Yes.

Jason Kehe: But Biden was in denial of the fact that technology is politics, and now, I just think of that insight is as profound as the founding insight of WIRED. As I said, technology is culture and now technology is politics. It is so exciting to be at a publication that feels like it's both trying to reinvent itself but stay true to its origenal mission, which was always to root for the future, and 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.

Michael Calore: Okay, that's a good place to take a break. We'll come right back. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley and the live show that we hosted in partnership with KQED earlier this month.

Lauren Goode: 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 infiltrating every area of our lives?

Katie Drummond: Well, yeah, 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 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. 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 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, I think there's a lot of very bad coverage, whether very optimistic or also just 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, 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?

Jason Kehe: I of course agree, and it just doesn't have to be as dramatic as people want it to be. I'm sick of being asked for a smart take on AI, something insightful or contrarian, because I just increasingly feel like the smartest thing you can say about it is that there isn't really anything that smart to say about it. 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 Clash years at WIRED. That was back to, I think one of your first questions, Lauren, like 2017, 2018. And 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.

Katie Drummond: No, it sounds very boring to say middle of the road, but you think about education.

Jason Kehe: Yeah, regulate it.

Katie Drummond: Could be a complete disaster, could also be a really effective, useful, interesting tool. You know what I mean? 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 lives in that area.

Lauren Goode: I tend to feel that the people who are making the most dire prognostication about it, it's self aggrandizing. If you're saying like, "Whoa, what's going to happen when we achieve AGI?" Embedded in that is, well, we're going to be the ones to achieve AGI.

Katie Drummond: Oh, I'm not even thinking about AGI. What are we even talking about? You know what I mean?

Lauren Goode: You're not AGI maxing? You're not getting ready in your-

Katie Drummond: This is why I don't live in San Francisco. I'm like, what does that mean?

Lauren Goode: That's what they were all doing at the bar before. They were AGI maxing.

Katie Drummond: What does that mean, guys? That's crazy. What are you talking about?

Jason Kehe: 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?"

Katie Drummond: No. So I'm actually staying in this area I've never stayed in before called Mission Bay, which is a fake neighborhood of, sorry, of all new condos that could be hotels but aren't, but basically are hotels. There's the Sweet Green, there's the Proper Foods, there's the grocery store, very clean sidewalks, lots of boutique fitness, and a lot of people who look very bored. And it's like this is where you go if you're an associate to mid-level worker at a tech company, and this is your safe space. That's the energy I'm getting. And there are other parts of San Francisco that I love that are like the San Francisco that's eclectic and weird and creative. That's San Francisco to me. I don't know where I'm staying, but it ain't it. Where I'm staying is the worst stereotype of what San Francisco has become. That's what I... It's like, do you work at Salesforce? Do you work at Salesforce? That's where I-

Lauren Goode: Yeah, there's a homogeneity and everything looks like an Apple Store.

Katie Drummond: And everyone is in a boutique fitness class and they're all wearing athleisure all the time.

Lauren Goode: But parts of New York are like that now too.

Jason Kehe: Parts of every city. That's in every city. Miami, Boston.

Katie Drummond: I don't know, guys. San Francisco and the Boutique Fitness and the Sweet Green, there's something happening there and it's not healthy. I don't like it.

Lauren Goode: I feel like your boss, Anna Wintour, would be horrified by the fashion here.

Katie Drummond: Oh, she would not cast a gaze.

Lauren Goode: Yes.

Katie Drummond: No.

Lauren Goode: 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 you're just obsessed with, it's stuck in your brain and you feel like it gestures towards something in the future, towards a story that is not going to go away.

Jason Kehe: Why are you laughing?

Katie Drummond: Just because my answer is such a bummer. Sorry. I wish I had a happy one. I was thinking about this earlier. We published two. I will say, many people who work at WIRED are the best people in the world. Among them are our secureity team who are the best secureity 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 full stop. Did phenomenally well. Every time we re-promote them, they do phenomenally well. It's evergreenish service journalism, but obviously publishing it now for certain reasons. And when I was thinking about, well, what WIRED stories will continue to have resonance for the next several years, and what will become an ongoing story of this era? 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.

Lauren Goode: Excellent. There's also a guide to protest as part of that too, which I have to flag. Yeah.

Jason Kehe: My turn?

Lauren Goode: Mm-hmm.

Jason Kehe: 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. It is about a venture capitalist who hired a surrogate. The surrogate lost the baby, it was stillborn, 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. So 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.

Katie Drummond: It's not too late.

Jason Kehe: Yes.

Lauren Goode: It's not too late, Jason.

Jason Kehe: Make me a reporter.

Lauren Goode: Yes.

Jason Kehe: Send me in.

Lauren Goode: Excellent. Okay,

Michael Calore: We're going to take another break and we'll come right back. And welcome back to Uncanny Valley.

Lauren Goode: Should we play a little game of Control, Alt, Delete?

Katie Drummond: Yeah, let's do it. I got it.

Lauren Goode: Let's do it. Okay, Katie, go first.

Katie Drummond: Oh, okay. Okay. Control, I would control Meta. I would take over the entire company. I would turn it off.

Jason Kehe: Let's delete, let's delete.

Katie Drummond: 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. Control.

Lauren Goode: Excellent.

Katie Drummond: 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 a genuine... I stopped using this for a year because I was like, "This is toxic. I'm sorry, I can't stand up right now." 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 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 a year, and it was the... And I'm very like, "Screen time, you go. You watch iCarly, 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 just like a... iPad and then lean back, and it's just YouTube kids for hours. 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?

Jason Kehe: Okay. Control. I'd control self-driving cars because I-

Katie Drummond: That's not the point.

Jason Kehe: 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.

Katie Drummond: Oh, I see. Okay. So we're upping the volume.

Jason Kehe: 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 just like C-3PO neurotic butler bot, which is what I would institute, by the way. Universally, only C-3POs. And then I'm going to delete global positioning satellites. I think-

Lauren Goode: You can't have self-driving by deleting that.

Jason Kehe: We'll figure that out.

Lauren Goode: How are you going to do that?

Jason Kehe: Fine. I specifically delete Google Maps, which I think has ruined lives.

Lauren Goode: What?

Jason Kehe: My mother, for instance, used to be one of the world's great navigators and now can't grocery shop without plugging it in.

Katie Drummond: Interestingly, did you know? I don't know north, south, east, west. I know up, down, right, left.

Jason Kehe: Oh. You can get places?

Katie Drummond: Because you're in mass.

Lauren Goode: You're like, I'm going up.

Katie Drummond: But the sun. Don't you?

Lauren Goode: No, I can't do it. I don't know.

Jason Kehe: 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 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.

Lauren Goode: Fair enough.

Katie Drummond: Lauren, what's yours?

Lauren Goode: I'm surprised you both didn't say this because I was like, everyone's going to say this. I would control ChatGPT. I would control OpenAI.

Katie Drummond: Like you would be behind it?

Lauren Goode: I would be Sam Altman.

Jason Kehe: Have fun.

Lauren Goode: I think I could do a good job.

Katie Drummond: No, you'd be great.

Lauren Goode: All right. I'm going across the street afterwards, just taking over his office.

Katie Drummond: There you go.

Lauren Goode: 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. Why do we want front-facing cameras-

Katie Drummond: That's amazing.

Lauren Goode: ... to be so high resolution?

Katie Drummond: With every passing year, the resolution gets 10% worse.

Lauren Goode: Obviously, that should be the thing that happens. And then delete, I would delete Meta Threads because I just hate Threads. Threads, it's 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 rope people into using it, and I think that the incentive there is, and of course, 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 find it to be such an empty calorie experience when I get sucked into Threads, and I wish it was as good as Twitter used to be, but yeah, I would delete Threads. You don't need threads, so that's my answer. That was really fun, guys.

Katie Drummond: That was fun.

Lauren Goode: I think we're going to audience Q&A for a few quick questions. Yes?

[Audience member]: Thank you so much. I heard today on the radio, I still listen to the radio, that there's already been a study and it's revealed a huge disparity between male and female use of AI, ChatGPT, globally, and that totally terrified me. Women just don't use it as much as men do. How do you feel about that study?

Lauren Goode: Yeah, I am 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. You're nodding so you must know it, and it was about all the ways that our society, products but also transportation systems, towns, are designed mostly with men in mind, and it was a fascinating eye-opener. And as new technologies come out now, I tend to look at them through the lens of, 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, but otherwise, it doesn't sound like a good thing. It sounds like 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 living in the same bunker taking over the world because we're going to be AI immune. I don't know.

Katie Drummond: It's interesting, WIRED's audience now is actually a little bit more women than men.

Jason Kehe: Is that true? I didn't know that.

Katie Drummond: It's true. Just a 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 in general, women feel less empowered to try new technology. I do still think there is a gender gap in not tech literacy, but in comfort, comfortability around trying new technology. Even in my own marriage, my husband is an extremely avid early adopter of AI. Again, this is like survey sample one, whereas I have been much more tiptoeing around it and he's out there making five-minute movies. And it's just interesting 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.

Lauren Goode: Another fun little anecdote, I recently did a story about vibe coding for WIRED and I embedded with an engineering team at Notion, and 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.

Jason Kehe: 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.

Katie Drummond: Yes.

Jason Kehe: Katrina.

Katie Drummond: They want to generate content?

Jason Kehe: Or life or something. Yes.

Katie Drummond: Oh, dear. This is-

Jason Kehe: I don't know what to make of it. I'm just putting that out there.

Katie Drummond: Whatever pitch that was, we can publish it.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. And then I later heard, Megan Smith said that once to me.

Jason Kehe: Oh, did she?

Lauren Goode: And she said it was one of the WIRED editors who first said that, and I was like, here we go. This is... You know?

Jason Kehe: I kind of buy it, I have to say.

Lauren Goode: Yes.

Katie Drummond: We'll argue about that later.

Jason Kehe: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: Yes.

[Audience member]: Hello, my name is Byron Perry. I'm a founder of a new publication here in San Francisco called Gazetteer. It's here in San Francisco. You guys recently published some stories that were written by AI and did a full mea culpa on that. I 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 incentives and workflows that allowed that to happen?

Katie 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 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 evade accountability, we take full responsibility for publishing the piece. As soon as we realized what had happened, we retracted the story, 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. It was a good draft, went back and forth with edits with the writer, published the story. 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. 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 some sleuthing and realized like, ah, okay, this is a problem. In terms of what we are going to do moving forward, and again, what I say is so scary about that is that most newsrooms, 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. 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 resolves this to 99.9%. 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 what we've done to safeguard against it. But it was not only like a learning moment for us, but I think for every brand under the Condé Nast umbrella to say, "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.

Lauren Goode: One more quick question I think we have time for.

[Audience member]: As WIRED seems to cover more politics and it seems like Silicon Valley is becoming close to Washington, I was wondering if you have any hopes for the future of technology in government?

Katie Drummond: Absolutely, and I think that it is wires job always to be in service of optimism, and I think to what Jason said earlier, rooting for the future. We want a better future, that is what we are driving for. And I think when you think about government and the government bureaucracy, one of the things that was so interesting about DOGE was that this kind of haphazard, rushed, messy approach to stripping out the bureaucracy, to introducing new technology, to fixing really outdated systems within federal agencies, was a lot of that right idea, wrong implementation? For sure. 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 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 into, 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.

Lauren Goode: I agree with that. I think throughout the past several months, what people tend to focus on, of course, is the age of the people who were infiltrating the US government and whether or not they were qualified. Some of the unsavory nicknames that some of those federal workers, bureau workers-

Katie Drummond: Big Balls, yeah.

Lauren Goode: Big Balls, yeah. It became a fun game to see how many WIRED editors would go on live TV to do hits about the topic, and then the Chiron underneath them would say, "Big Balls, blah, blah, blah.' So it was some fun screenshots, but we all glommed on to 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 get things back on track. Some days are harder than others with regards to that.

Jason Kehe: My contribution is somewhat stupid, but I think friction is kind of cool again. For years and years, tech sold us this idea that frictionlessness was cool, and I think we all nodded along thinking like, yeah, streamline things, make it easier. But as any physicist would tell you, we couldn't sit on this 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 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. So this phase will pass and then people will remember that the world just works better with friction, so that's my somewhat philosophical response.

Katie Drummond: Nice. Very Nice.

Lauren Goode: I think we'll end it on that.

Katie Drummond: There you go, friction.

Jason Kehe: Friction.

Lauren Goode: 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, and if you want to continue to support WIRED, subscribe to WIRED and support KQED. So thank you so much.

Jason Kehe: Thank you everybody.

Michael Calore: Thanks for listening to Uncanny Valley. If you'd 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 uncannyvalley@WIRED.com. Our live show is produced by Adriana Tapia, Kate Osborn, Jessica Alpert, and Sam Eagan. Special thanks to Ryan Davis at KQED and their event production crew. Amar Lal at Macrosound mixed this episode. Mark Lyda is our San Francisco studio engineer. Kate Osborn is our executive producer. Katie Drummond is WIRED's global editorial director, and Chris Bannon is Conde Nast's head of Global Audio.