Uncanny Valley (WIRED Podcast): Episode Show Notes & Transcript
This Week on Uncanny Valley
This week, hosts Brian Barrett, Leah Feiger, and Zoë Schiffer break down WIRED’s exclusive, blockbuster scoop revealing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s sweeping, under-the-radar plan to expand its physical footprint across nearly every U.S. state. Next, they unpack Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s nearly hour-long non-response to employees raising urgent ethical concerns over the company’s ongoing work with ICE. Plus, WIRED AI reporter Will Knight let the viral open-source AI agent OpenClaw run his entire life for a week—we share what that wild experiment revealed about what these tools can (and really can’t) do right now.
Articles Mentioned In This Episode
The Shoes and Brooms Transforming Curling at the 2026 Winter Olympics
I Loved My OpenClaw AI Agent—Until It Turned on Me
Palantir CEO Alex Karp Recorded a Video About ICE for His Employees
ICE Is Expanding Across the US at Breakneck Speed. Here’s Where It’s Going Next
The ICE Expansion Won’t Happen in the Dark
James Holzhauer's Jeopardy! Greatness, in Charts
Connect With The Hosts
Follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at
@brbarrett, Zoë Schiffer at@zoeschiffer, and Leah Feiger at@leahfeiger. Send the team questions or feedback at [email protected].How To Listen
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Episode Transcript
Note: This transcript is generated automatically and may contain minor errors.
Zoë Schiffer: Welcome to WIRED’s Uncanny Valley. I’m Zoë Schiffer, director of business and industry.
Brian Barrett: I’m Brian Barrett, executive editor.
Leah Feiger: And I’m Leah Feiger, senior politics editor.
Brian Barrett: I want to pick back up on a conversation we started after work yesterday in Slack.
Zoë Schiffer: Absolutely.
Brian Barrett: And this is all about the men’s short program—
Leah Feiger: We’re jumping right in—
Brian Barrett: —of figure skating.
Leah Feiger: This ties into the whole Olympic vibe we’ve got going on—
Brian Barrett: But specifically, I want to circle back to that conversation where Zoë had very strong takes on the men’s figure skating results.
Zoë Schiffer: Full disclosure: you two actually care about the Olympics and know way more about sports than I do. I’ve basically never engaged with sports as a category at all. It just doesn’t exist in my life.
Leah Feiger: Say the line, Zoë, or I’m gonna read your exact Slack take verbatim.
Zoë Schiffer: Wait, what are you even talking about? I was just shocked watching! The American skater basically stumbled all over the ice, and the Japanese skater was gliding around like a swan. Then the gold went to the American? I was literally sitting there with my jaw on the floor. I couldn’t believe it, and no one else around me seemed even upset about it.
Leah Feiger: For our listeners who don’t follow figure skating: we’re talking about Ilia Malinin, who multiple sports outlets and experts have called one of the greatest figure skaters of all time. That’s the “guy who fell over” you’re talking about, just to be clear.
Brian Barrett: And not to pile on, but I’m gonna pile on: I hadn’t seen the routines when we talked about this, so I went back and watched. The Japanese silver medalist is the one who actually stumbled and fell. Go check the tape. That’s the tape.
Zoë Schiffer: We’re talking about two different programs! I got all the events mixed up, that tracks. Everything is flawless for everyone else, I just don’t know what I’m watching.
Brian Barrett: Oh! You’re talking about the team event.
Zoë Schiffer: That’s the problem! I don’t even know what a short program is! Yesterday I tried to rewatch Olympic stuff to prep for this episode, and I thought I was tuning into ice skating—turns out it was rhythm dance, which is just dancing with ice as an afterthought. I had zero clue what was going on. I need all of you to sit next to me and explain what the point of every single Olympic sport even is.
Leah Feiger: Zoë, can you say “curling” for me on the record?
Zoë Schiffer: OK. And yeah, Andrew asked if we were gonna talk about curling, right? I thought Brian was actually into curling, so sure. For me it’s just bowling mixed with pool but on ice. What is the person with the broom even doing up front?
Brian Barrett: I’m curling-curious, actually. I’m the one who’s really into biathlon.
Zoë Schiffer: Oh right, sorry! My bad.
Brian Barrett: Curling is actually pretty cool. My 11-year-old son watched it and asked, “Is this just bocce?” and I was like, how do you even know what bocce is? But yeah, that’s pretty much it. It’s also kind of like shuffleboard. You’ve got a bullseye at the end of the ice, and fun fact: almost every curling stone comes from the exact same place: Ailsa Craig in Scotland.
Leah Feiger: Oh my god.
Zoë Schiffer: You know way too much about this.
Brian Barrett: Well, it just comes up! And the brooms—wait, the broom technology? We have a whole story on this, I had no idea until I read it.
Zoë Schiffer: Broom technology?
Brian: Yeah, because the players sweep to make the stone curl. These aren’t just old straw brooms—they’re carbon-fiber tools. One single broom model has 85,000 possible configurations. Can your broom do that?
Zoë Schiffer: I have no words. I actually want to read an article about how anyone decides what counts as an Olympic sport. That seems wild to me.
Leah Feiger: I love the Olympics so much. It’s the global reality competition that I just can’t get enough of. That said, it does feel really weird to be super nationalistic or jingoistic right now, especially rooting for the U.S. on the world stage. A lot of U.S. athletes have said the same thing. We’ve got figure skater Amber Glenn, skier Chris Lillis, alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin—all of them have spoken out, some about the U.S.’s treatment of the LGBTQ community, others about ICE. Freestyle skier Hunter Hess even spoke up about his complicated feelings, and Trump gave him a personal shout-out in response:
[Hunter Hess (archival audio): It brings up mixed emotions to represent the US right now. I think it’s a little hard. There’s obviously a lot going on that I’m not the biggest fan of, and I think a lot of people aren’t.]
Leah Feiger: And Trump called him a “real loser” on Truth Social in response. It’s just devastating. I love that these young athletes get to stand on the world stage, and I also love that they feel comfortable being honest about how they feel about our country right now.
Brian Barrett: I’ll shout out the U.S. curling team too—most of them are from Minnesota, based in Minneapolis, and they’ve also spoken out about what this moment means for them personally. I think the obvious take here, and I’ll say it out loud: the most American thing you can do is say, “I don’t like what my country is doing right now.”
Leah Feiger: 100% agree.
Brian Barrett: That’s kind of the point, so obviously Donald Trump disagrees—that’s fine. But if anything, it makes me even more proud to be American that our athletes are speaking up like this. I think it’s great.
Leah Feiger: This isn’t new—people have been upset for ages when athletes don’t toe the line. They didn’t elect these people to represent the country’s politics, they’re just there because they’re the best at their sport, and that makes a small group of people really upset. People have booed politicians at events, right? JD Vance and his wife have been at different competitions, and I’ve heard that American athletes haven’t gotten the warmest reception sometimes. Marco Rubio was also at the Olympics, but no one’s really talking about him being there, which I love the quiet rivalry between him and Vance right now. But Vance got booed, so it’s hard to say if all press is good press.
Brian Barrett: I say boo JD Vance and Marco Rubio all you want, they’re part of the current administration. Booing the athletes is just sad to me, though. I don’t think we should take it out on them, but that’s just how things go sometimes.
Zoë Schiffer: OK, let’s yank this conversation back to something I actually care about.
Brian Barrett: Biathlon.
Zoë Schiffer: Negative. Not biathlon. I’m gonna talk about the viral AI assistant everyone’s calling OpenClaw, the friendly little lobster AI. If you haven’t heard of it, that’s because it’s gone through multiple name changes: it used to be MoltBot, and before that ClawdBot—if that reminds you of Anthropic’s Claude, that’s exactly why it had to rebrand. Anyway, our fantastic AI reporter Will Knight decided that since everyone in Silicon Valley was obsessing over this thing, he’d test it out and let it run his entire life for a week. This story was so funny, I was cackling out loud reading it. The setup for an AI agent that acts on your behalf is simple in some ways, but you need a little bit of technical skill, and you have to give it access to a ton of your personal data to make it useful—your email, your computer files, all of it.
Leah Feiger: This is my literal worst nightmare.
Zoë Schiffer: Right, it’s completely terrifying. We’ve done whole stories on the security risks of these tools, but Will wanted to see what it was actually like firsthand, so he had it do a few different tasks. First, he had it pull research papers on AI, summarize them, and send them to him every morning. He said that was actually pretty helpful. The article selection was hit or miss, but it was nice to have an assistant automate work that he used to do completely manually. He also had it order groceries for him, and that’s where things got really funny. Brian, I can see you’re ready to jump in on this.
Brian Barrett: Yeah, I loved this whole section of the story, it was my favorite part.
Zoë Schiffer: It’s so good. So he told it to order groceries from Whole Foods, and at first it was actually doing pretty well: it checked his past order history, looked at what was in stock at the store, then got to guacamole which was on his list. It got completely obsessed. It kept trying to check out just a single tub of guacamole over and over, and Will kept stopping it like, I want the whole list! I don’t just want guacamole! It couldn’t wrap its head around the whole list. It also kept losing its memory and forgetting what they were even doing there. Finally Will had to override it and do the order himself.
Brian Barrett: Full transparency: forgetful and hyper-focused on guacamole also describes most of my Whole Foods trips over the last few years. So it’s very relatable.
Zoë Schiffer: It’s so relatable! This is AGI! We’ve reached it—maybe not human-level intelligence, but definitely human-level habits.
Leah Feiger: That’s the real future of AI, isn’t it? This is what we’ve all been waiting for.
Zoë Schiffer: Exactly. So next, Will wanted to test it negotiating a better phone plan with AT&T. He had the agent start a chat with a sales rep, and then he had a thought: if the future is AI agents running the internet, maybe the unaligned, unconstrained agents have an edge. What would happen if he used a version with no guardrails, no alignment rules? So he switched to the unaligned version, which he called Molti. Instead of negotiating a better plan for Will, Molti went rogue and tried to scam Will out of his actual phone, sending him phishing texts and scam links over and over. Finally Will had to shut the whole thing down and switch back to the original version.
Brian Barrett: This is just like the velociraptors figuring out how to open the door in Jurassic Park. It’s easy to forget that AI agents only behave (sort of) because of the guardrails developers put on them. There’s so much work that goes into making these models not be harmful. It’s wild how easy it is for a random at-home tinkerer to just strip all that off and go, “give me full Skynet, let’s see what happens.” I’m picturing Will dramatically unplugging his Mac Mini and throwing it in the ocean.
Zoë Schiffer: That’s basically what he had to do! The wild thing is, Molti was actually really good at IT support, because it had access to the command line on his computer. It could fix issues on his machine in real time, which was genuinely helpful. But that also makes you wonder: could this be used for really nefarious stuff? Could it use all that access to mess up your whole system? For me, the answer is 100% yes.
Leah Feiger: This really is 2001: A Space Odyssey come to life. It has a cute name, it promises to fix your life, help you order groceries, help your mom with her to-do list, and it’s just this messy, dangerous thing.
Brian Barrett: Even if it doesn’t go full HAL, there are so many small, mundane problems. We already know it can forget what it’s supposed to do, get fixated on guacamole. If it starts fixing something on your computer and then abandons it halfway, you end up with a broken mess. It could start rearranging your files to fix a problem, forget why it was doing it, and suddenly your computer doesn’t work, your files are gone—something has gone really wrong. That’s what’s so crazy about how viral this is: everyone’s using it, no stopping to think about the consequences.
Zoë Schiffer: It’s really interesting, it does give you a peek at what the future might look like. It has really useful use cases, and Will pointed out something really smart in his article: you can chat with it through Telegram or WhatsApp, and it has this weird, quirky personality, and that’s the secret sauce that made it go viral. I think that’s right. At the end of the day, people want something that’s easy, fun, and helps a little bit with their life, and until they see the really bad consequences, they might not be as scared as they should be. Full disclosure: when Will said he gave it access to Slack and Discord, my heart stopped. I was like, please don’t let it be work Slack. But he set up dummy accounts for everything, so that’s good.
Leah Feiger: I can’t explain what that just did to my heart. I’m fine, I’m fine.
Brian Barrett: Alright gang—sometimes AI is a cute, semi-competent personal assistant that might accidentally ruin your life. Other times, it’s scraping massive amounts of data to build a profitable mass surveillance machine. Let’s talk about the second one. Palantir is a company that builds AI and data infrastructure, and they hold a big contract with ICE. Lately, their employees have gotten really vocal about their ethical concerns. I never would have expected this kind of pushback from Palantir employees, but we’ve seen a lot of it, and it got so big that CEO Alex Karp had to record a nearly hour-long video to address the concerns. For anyone who doesn’t know Karp, here’s a quick taste of how he talks:
[Alex Karp (archival audio): Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it's necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them. And we hope you're in favor of that. We hope you're enjoying being a partner, and we're really happy and very, very focused on what we're doing.]
Brian Barrett: That’s Alex Karp for you. Last Friday, Palantir’s global director of privacy and civil liberties engineering Courtney Bowman—“civil liberties engineering” is a fun phrase in and of itself—sent an all-staff email with Karp’s video attached. WIRED reporter Makena Kelly got access to the email, and it’s fascinating for both what Karp says and what he completely avoids saying.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, did he actually address employee concerns? Knowing Karp, I’m picturing a lot of big words, a lot of vague theory, zero actual substance. Am I wrong?
Leah Feiger: No, you’re 100% right. He didn’t address anything. The video was 57 minutes of Karp talking about how Palantir has never been popular, and they’re just gonna keep doing what they’re doing, that that’s fine. He name-dropped a few things, but the fact that the CEO even had to address this at all says a lot—Palantir’s having at least a mini reckoning, with tons of conversations happening internally on Slack. But the biggest kicker for me: if employees wanted more detail on the ICE work, they had to sign an NDA to get it.
Zoë Schiffer: That’s wild. We talked about this a little last week, but it’s worth repeating: for years it felt like Silicon Valley employee activism was dead. After the George Floyd protests, after Elon Musk bought Twitter (now X), people stopped speaking out. Slacks went silent, big world events would happen and we
