Uncanny Valley (WIRED Podcast) | Full Episode Transcript
In this week’s episode of Uncanny Valley, WIRED’s weekly podcast covering tech, politics, and culture, hosts Brian Barrett and Zoë Schiffer welcome guest co-host Tim Marchman, WIRED’s director of science, politics, and security, to break down the week’s top headlines. Their conversation covers the spread of harmful misinformation by far-right influencers in Minneapolis, the messy, uneven launch of TikTok’s newly restructured U.S. operation, and the sudden, viral Silicon Valley obsession with the local AI assistant Moltbot.
Articles referenced in this episode:
ICE Is Using Palantir’s AI Tools to Sort Through Citizen Tips
Google DeepMind Employees Demand Leadership Guarantee Their "Physical Safety" From ICE Collaboration
TikTok Is Expanding Its U.S. User Data Collection: Here Are the 3 Biggest Changes
How Moltbot Became Silicon Valley’s Favorite New AI Sidekick
You can follow the hosts on Bluesky: Brian Barrett at @brbarrett, Zoë Schiffer at @zoeschiffer, and Tim Marchman at @timmarchman. Send questions or tips to the team at [email protected].
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Full Transcript
Note: This transcript is automated, so it may contain minor errors.
Brian Barrett: How’s everyone doing today?
Tim Marchman: I’m doing really great, actually.
Zoë Schiffer: Wow. That’s something.
Brian Barrett: Shocking, honestly.
Brian Barrett: Yeah, for sure. Tim, what’s your secret?
Tim Marchman: I’ve actually gotten pretty good at reminding myself that my anxious gut feelings don’t always match reality, and I have to examine them logically.
Brian Barrett: That’s way better than my coping mechanism: my kids just discovered Mario Kart, so I’ve been playing nonstop. What about you, Zoë?
Zoë Schiffer: I’m hanging in there. I will say I’ve hit a bit of a mental-emotional wall with everything going on right now, but I’m really grateful to have this work. Back during the early days of the first Trump presidency, I worked a corporate tech job, and I constantly felt like what I was doing didn’t matter at all. I’m so glad I’m not back there—that was such a tough time.
Brian Barrett: But Zoë, is there anything you’re looking forward to in the next day or so?
Zoë Schiffer: OK, yes! A thousand times yes. To prove how well-rounded I am, I’m going to the premiere of the Melania Trump movie.
Brian Barrett: Hell yeah.
Zoë Schiffer: Amazon Studios poured millions and millions into just the trailer for this thing. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it—
Tim Marchman: I have never been more jealous of anyone in my life.
Zoë Schiffer: I know, right? It’s such over-the-top work. They made it so dramatic. And don’t get me wrong, but as far as I can tell, Melania Trump doesn’t really have any obvious, distinct personality, but they pulled every trick out of the book to try to hide that.
Brian Barrett: Tim, to be fair, I’d bet good money you could still get a ticket if you wanted.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, totally.
Tim Marchman: I already checked for tickets around Philadelphia, and I actually have my pick of seats. The bad news is it’s not playing anywhere in the city proper—I’d have to drive all the way out to a big suburban mall. I just can’t commit to that. So I’ll wait and watch it at home on my big screen, with a giant bucket of popcorn and a sarsaparilla.
Zoë Schiffer: I can’t wait. I’ll report back.
Brian Barrett: You know what? I’ll be watching right alongside you at home.
Zoë Schiffer: Welcome to WIRED’s Uncanny Valley. I’m Zoë Schiffer, WIRED’s director of business and industry.
Brian Barrett: I’m Brian Barrett, executive editor.
Tim Marchman: And I’m Tim Marchman, director of science, politics, and security. I’m filling in for Leah Feiger this week.
Let’s kick things off with the story that’s dominated everyone’s attention this week: the ongoing ICE activity unfolding across Minnesota.
This past weekend, tens of thousands of Minnesotans took to the streets for peaceful protests against increased federal immigration agent activity in the state, and to document the violence that’s already occurred. That includes the fatal shooting of Minneapolis resident Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent, and the arrest of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos. Things escalated further when federal agents shot and killed another person: Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse who was participating in the protests. In recent days, the Trump administration has announced it’s removing Gregory Bovino, a border patrol official serving as commander-at-large, from Minnesota. Border czar Tom Homan is taking over operations in the state, but tensions on the ground haven’t cooled down. And just last night, this happened:
[Archival Audio: Representative Ilhan Omar] ICE cannot be reformed. It cannot be rehabilitated. We must abolish ICE for good.
Tim Marchman: Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar was sprayed with an unknown substance while speaking to constituents at a town hall.
[Archival Audio]
Ilhan Omar: And DHS Secretary Kristi Noem must resign or face impeachment.
Multiple Speakers: Whoa, whoa! What is that? What is that? What did he spray?
Ilhan Omar: I don’t know.
Multiple Speakers: Oh my God. Oh my God.
Tim Marchman: This is incredibly scary, and this incident highlights a key dynamic here: the outsized role of far-right influencers. The official pretext for ICE’s presence in Minnesota is that the Trump administration wanted to ramp up response to an existing fraud crisis in the state’s Medicaid program. That crisis is real, but the claims that drew the administration’s attention to it were completely unsubstantiated. A right-wing influencer named Nick Shirley was particularly influential here, pushing a viral YouTube video that claimed, with no proof, that Somali-owned daycare centers in Minneapolis had misappropriated millions in public funds. And now we’ve seen a violent attack on a member of Congress—who is, of course, a Somali American—carried out by someone who, based on his online profile, was deeply radicalized by these exact claims. What do you two make of the role far-right actors are playing here?
Brian Barrett: Tim, it goes even further than that. The attacker was clearly inspired by these claims, but as soon as the attack happened, far-right influencers immediately spun the incident as a staged hoax. It turned into its own conspiracy vortex, with people claiming you could see Omar giving the attacker a signal to fake the attack. Even President Trump told ABC News soon after the attack that “she probably staged it herself, knowing her.” We’re just stuck in this endless loop where anytime anything happens—we’ve seen this over and over throughout ICE’s deployment to Minneapolis and Minnesota broadly—there’s an immediate push to spin, smear, and slander with no basis in reality. That’s just the standard playbook now, and far-right influencers stick to it perfectly. Can I say ne’er-do-wells here, Zoë? What do you think of ne’er-do-wells?
Zoë Schiffer: You live in Alabama. You absolutely have every right to say ne’er-do-well.
Brian Barrett: Is ne’er-do-well an Alabaman thing? Is that Southern?
Zoë Schiffer: It feels old-school in a really appealing way. I was really struck by the instant smear campaign against Alex Pretti, too. I think what you both are saying is right—our shared sense of reality has completely broken down, which gives people endless room to spin events in these wild ways. But talking about the nurse who was killed: first, far-right influencers just outright lied, saying he tried to assassinate an ICE agent who acted in self-defense. Then they walked that back to claim he was in the country illegally. Now they’ve settled on, “OK, he was a normal guy, but it was irresponsible to bring a gun to the protest.” It’s been fascinating and horrifying to watch this play out in real time.
Brian Barrett: And that’s where it clashes with Second Amendment rights, which is obviously a core pillar of conservative policy. You’re actually starting to see some pushback here. I think this is one of the first times we’ve seen the second Trump administration backtrack this much. I don’t know if that means much long-term, but it’s interesting to see that they’re hitting some apparent limits to what they can claim and how far they can spin events.
Tim Marchman: That’s significant, because the core operating rule of Donald Trump and his advisor Stephen Miller is that you never concede, you never retreat, and admitting weakness just invites attack. That strategy has worked for them before. When we talk about far-right influencers here, we’re not just talking about random people online—we’re talking about people at the highest levels of the administration, who instantly called Pretti a terrorist, an assassin, and pushed claims that were easily disproven. They’ve been forced to walk that back, and there’s even an ongoing leak war between factions within the administration, with people pointing fingers at each other. That’s a new development. This White House has never been willing to admit it was wrong, or walk anything back.
The fact that they’re ceding ground to public opinion, to op-ed writers, to elected Republican officials, and to the broader public, shows that they can’t just impose their version of reality without accounting for actual reality. That’s something that makes me a little less doom-y about the moment.
Speaking of flip-flopping, let’s talk about what Silicon Valley leaders have been saying and doing around all this. On Saturday, just hours after federal agents killed Pretti, a group of tech CEOs spent Saturday night at a private White House screening of the Melania documentary produced by Amazon MGM Studios. The group included Apple’s Tim Cook, Amazon’s Andy Jassy, and AMD’s Lisa Su. We also reported that Brett Ratner, the project’s director who’s well-known (and well-criticized) for being difficult to work with, was even difficult to work with on this production. Zoë, you’ve been hearing from sources about this—what’s the takeaway?
Zoë Schiffer: This is one of those moments where the levity and gravity of the situation are both totally obvious. The very same day Alex Pretti was shot, we got the news that these CEOs were gathering at the White House. Brian and I both assumed Tim Cook would say he had weather trouble, his plane couldn’t land, something. But when we scrolled social media, there were pictures of him there. Pictures of Lisa Su there. They showed up, fully aware of what was going on that day.
This moment feels really fascinating to me. We’ve had a lot of tech worker activism across Silicon Valley since the 2018 George Floyd protests, but after Elon Musk bought Twitter, things got really quiet. People were less willing to speak out, they were nervous about their jobs, the labor market was weak. A lot of those concerns are still there now, but the workers I’ve talked to at Apple and other companies say this screening was a real tipping point—they were furious. They were sending internal messages to leadership saying this was completely unacceptable, asking why their bosses would show up. It took Tim Cook a few days to put out an internal statement, right Brian?
Brian Barrett: Yeah, a couple days.
Zoë Schiffer: Right, a couple days to draft a statement. The statement was pretty tepid, to say the least, but he did acknowledge it’s a really trying moment. He essentially spun his presence by saying he used the opportunity to share his views with President Trump, seemingly implying he spoke up about immigration.
Brian Barrett: If we go back and check what he actually said, he even said “I’ve talked to President Trump this week” — he ducked saying it was in person at the screening. I think he just followed up with a call later after the backlash. It’s all pretty ridiculous.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I hate to speculate, but I’ll say it straight: I find that extremely hard to believe. Tim Cook is first and foremost a diplomat who uses his position to advance Apple and Apple’s interests. I don’t think most of these CEOs see it as in their interest, or their company’s interest, to go head-to-head with President Trump in any meaningful way. But we have seen rank-and-file employees use this moment to speak up, post on X, and say this is not OK.
We also had a scoop this week from our great AI reporter Maxwell Zeff, who broke the story that Google DeepMind workers say a federal agent showed up at Google’s Cambridge office last fall, and they’re asking leadership what they’re doing to keep them safe. It’s easy to look at that request and roll your eyes, think well-paid tech workers are centering themselves here. But Silicon Valley’s workforce is heavily made up of immigrants, highly skilled workers from other countries. They have legitimate concerns about their own safety, the feeling that even your wealth, your job, your status might not keep you safe right now.
Brian Barrett: To put this in even sharper context, we had another scoop this week from Makena Kelly about Palantir. Palantir works so closely with the federal government on everything, and they have a $30 million contract with DHS and ICE to build a platform literally called Immigration OS, whose whole purpose is to gather data for deportations. Even Palantir employees were asking in public Slack channels what they can do to stop this. The fact that Palantir employees are more outspoken than Tim Cook or these other CEOs is baffling. We’re really living in an upside-down world right now. Notably, Palantir executives just said “this is what we do, and we’re going to keep doing it.” Same with Apple, same with all these other companies. Until this employee anger translates to actionable change, it’s all just PR.
Tim Marchman: My question for both of you is: do these leaders actually understand the stakes here? One of the most striking things I saw in the Palantir employees’ Slack discussion was people asking about long-term consequences. Doesn’t Palantir see that a future Democratic administration could cancel their contracts, or that public revulsion could hurt them long term? Almost universally, these tech barons act like there won’t be a future after this current moment. That’s something I just can’t wrap my head around.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, if you look at Russian oligarchs, they learned this the hard way. When you bend the knee and fall completely in line, you put yourself in a precarious position—if you ever stray from the party line, you’ll face swift punishment, and your money won’t protect you. But that’s kind of the “genius” of what Trump is doing, if I can put it that way. He gets people to move their moral line closer and closer to his, over and over, and then it becomes a sunk cost. They think “well, I already showed up to the inauguration, I already praised Trump in these ways, I already positioned my company to win right now—if I walk away now, I lose everything I’ve done up to this point.”
Brian Barrett: I’m not excusing this, but at the end of the day, they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders.
Zoë Schiffer: How dare you bring that word into this space!
Brian Barrett: I’m sorry, but it’s true! Ne’er-do-wells with fiduciary responsibilities. But Donald Trump has proven he can tank a company overnight, or force the U.S. government to take a huge stake in a company overnight. He can do so much damage to these companies in the short term that I understand why they see the risk. That doesn’t mean I agree with how they’re handling it.
Speaking of the U.S. government having a huge impact on companies, can we switch gears and talk about TikTok?
Zoë Schiffer: We have to.
Brian Barrett: Perfect. It’s not lighter, exactly, but it’s not as heavy as what we were just talking about. The U.S. version of TikTok launched last week, on January 22, right? We’re officially in this brave new world where TikTok is technically owned by U.S.-based shareholders, but still has ties to ByteDance, and the algorithm is the same as before. A lot of this whole restructuring feels like it’s just for show, and to benefit allies of Donald Trump. And the launch has been really rocky.
[Archival Audio: TikTok User] All right, TikTok, what the hell is going on?
Brian Barrett: Users have complained that critical content about ICE and Donald Trump is being suppressed.
[Archival Audio: TikTok User] TikTok is now censoring our content a lot more now, especially since this switchover.
[Archival Audio: TikTok User] My views on this app right now are trash, and they have been ever since it was bought by Larry Ellison.
[Archival Audio: TikTok User] Apparently my face and the news is against the community guidelines.
Zoë Schiffer: This was so interesting. A huge portion of users couldn’t access the app for a while, which was actually just an outage, but users immediately interpreted the outage as censorship. That’s an accusation that’s followed TikTok for years, and it’s actually part of why we’re in this moment in the first place, where TikTok U.S. was transferred to majority U.S. ownership. People were quick to speculate the algorithm was changed specifically to please Donald Trump.
Tim Marchman: It doesn’t really matter if you can prove the outage was just from a storm-related data center failure—this alone is a problem. The new ownership has immediately destroyed a lot of credibility with its core user base, that’s pretty glaring.
Brian Barrett: We mentioned the ownership briefly earlier, so let’s break that down. Oracle owns 15 percent of the TikTok U.S. joint venture. Oracle’s cofounder is Larry Ellison, who’s a very close ally of Donald Trump. Ellison’s son, David Ellison, is CEO of Paramount Skydance, which installed Bari Weiss to
