‘Uncanny Valley’: Pentagon vs. ‘Woke’ Anthropic, Agentic vs. Mimetic, and Trump vs. State of the Union

This week, the Uncanny Valley team dives into the feud that has been brewing between Anthropic and the Pentagon—and what it says about how the government interacts with tech companies. Later, Zoë Schiffer tells us why figuring out whether you are agentic or mimetic has become the new litmus test in Silicon Valley. Plus, we discuss the key takeaways from the State of the Union address and give a farewell to the TAT-8 undersea cables—the ones that made our modern internet possible.

Articles mentioned in this episode:

• Are You ‘Agentic’ Enough for the AI Era?
• Say Goodbye to the Undersea Cable That Made the Global Internet Possible

You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett, Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer, and Leah Feiger on Bluesky at @leahfeiger. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.

How to Listen

You can always listen to this week’s podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here’s how:

If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for “uncanny valley.” We’re on Spotify too.

Transcript

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

Brian Barrett: Hey, it’s Brian. Zoë, Leah, and I have really enjoyed being your new hosts these past few weeks, and we want to hear from you. If you like the show and have a minute, please leave us a review in the podcast or app of your choice. It really helps us reach more people. And for any questions and comments, you can always reach us at uncannyvalley@wired.com. Thank you for listening. On to the show.

Leah Feiger: Hey, how’s it going?

Zoë Schiffer: I feel great. Brian?

Brian Barrett: I feel terrific, and I know Leah does too because Survivor‘s back tonight, another thing that we care about and you don’t.

Zoë Schiffer: How do you know I don’t? I mean, I don’t. I don’t, except for my best friend from childhood tried to go on it and then she didn’t get on, so it’s irrelevant.

Leah Feiger: Famously, one day I’m going to apply, and both Brian and our colleague Tim have assured me that I can leave for a month to the beaches of Fiji and come back and still keep my job.

Zoë Schiffer: I think most people would be like, Leah, you’re not going to survive out there, but they don’t know about your deep sea diving prowess.

Leah Feiger: I actually think I would be fine. I really, really want to do this. One day, you guys.

Brian Barrett: But Leah, it would require you to potentially kill some fish to eat them, which is not normally—

Leah Feiger: That’s OK.

Brian Barrett: Oh, OK.

Leah Feiger: No, no, no, no, fishing’s fine. Subsistence living, that’s very OK. It’s like the larger institutionalization of the mass murder of our sea that I take a bit of a bigger issue with.

Zoë Schiffer: And on that note, 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.

Leah Feiger: And I’m Leah Feiger, senior politics editor.

Zoë Schiffer: OK. I feel like we have to start today with this feud that is escalating day by day, hour by hour between Anthropic and the Pentagon. So to set the stage a little bit, Anthropic last summer scored a contract of up to $200 million with the Defense Department. Are we calling it the Department of War? No.

Brian Barrett: We are calling it the Defense Department because Department of War is a secondary title per the executive order.

Leah Feiger: And a name change requires an act of Congress. There’s a lot in here. So no, we are all good on DOD. I love calling it the DOD.

Zoë Schiffer: Great. Before we get completely derailed by the name, Anthropic, they won this contract and then things have gotten pretty tense since then because basically these two sides have very, very different views on how AI technology should be used by the DOD. Anthropic has pretty strict restrictions on how their technology can be deployed. For instance, it can’t be used for domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.

Leah Feiger: The fully autonomous weapons thing really gets me. What Anthropic is saying here is not like some woke left-wing wild thing. It’s saying that machines can’t be the ones to fully push the button, right?

Zoë Schiffer: Right.

Leah Feiger: They can’t kill people just themselves. They have to do it with the help of people. That feels reasonable.

Zoë Schiffer: Right. This is a stance that is not OK with certain members of the DOD, namely Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. He met with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei earlier this week, and he basically gave Dario an ultimatum. The company has until Friday to comply with the Pentagon’s demands, basically saying that the AI can be used however the DOD wants without restrictions, or the DOD might actually cancel their contract.

Brian Barrett: Zoë, what’s fascinating to me about this, among many things, including the DOD’s threat to use the power of the state to force Anthropic to give them access to its AI to do whatever it wants, the DOD has options here. They’ve got a contract with xAI, they work with all the big players, other companies do not have these restrictions. So why is it so important to them that Anthropic specifically has to be able to do this? Can’t they use Grok?

Zoë Schiffer: They’ve already signed a deal with xAI. I mean, my feeling about this, and Brian and Leah, I’m curious what you think about this, is it seems like a little bit performative. I think they’re trying to make a point that companies that want big military contracts or big contracts with the government at all aren’t allowed to put their company values in those contracts. Basically, if you want this money, you have to do whatever it takes to win.

Brian Barrett: Zoë, I want to go back to what I alluded to before, which is that in terms of making a show of it and demonstrating their power here, they suggested they might invoke the Defense Production Act, which is normally what you do in wartime. If you’re say, we need more tires for our Humvees, we’re going to go to Goodyear and have them make more tires for us. And we saw the Defense Production Act invoked during Covid to make people make masks. It is normally tied to physical goods. It is normally tied to a state of emergency. This is just we want to play with your shiny toy and you won’t let us, which just sort of seemed like an outrageous use of that potentially.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I will say it’s not completely clear to me that this is a horrible position for Anthropic to be in purely because the company is really differentiating itself in this moment, not really because of its technology, but because of its brand. And its brand is a little bit like holier than thou, a little more values-based than some of its competitors. And so while this is a lot of money on the line, and I think Anthropic wants to be a government contractor, it really is cementing this vision of the company as being like, we’re different, we’re better, we’re willing to take a stand, where say, Sam Altman might not be.

Leah Feiger: What you’re saying really keys into exactly what Secretary Hegseth said when he was announcing this partnership with xAI. You guys have to listen to this.

Pete Hegseth, archival audio: We will judge AI models on this standard alone—factually accurate, mission relevant, without ideological constraints that limit lawful military applications. Department of War AI will not be woke. It will work for us.

Zoë Schiffer: Right. Right, right, right. It’s bringing to mind the kind of woke AI executive order that rolled out last year. I talked to many, many people to be like, have you heard from the government on this? Are they asking you to change certain things? And the answer, at least from the sources I spoke to, was basically a resounding no, which told me one thing. That was for show. That was about making a point. It wasn’t necessarily about literally changing the product that these companies are building.

Brian Barrett: I’m trying to think of a corollary if this were not lines of code and a physical product. I feel like it’s almost like going to iRobot and saying, look, we need your Roombas to explode. We need exploding Roombas. We need to deploy them in the Kremlin. That’s sort of the level of overreach here to me.

Leah Feiger: No, this is wild overreach. Obviously the news feels like it’s breaking every hour or so on this. This person said this and Amodei said this. And I don’t know. This really does feel like it’s going to be heading to a breaking point. And so far we haven’t actually seen—correct me if I’m wrong, this is your world, Zoë—we haven’t actually seen any tech companies face down the Trump administration in any meaningful way whatsoever.

Zoë Schiffer: I mean, yeah, certainly it’s been more normal for them to simply fall in line. I think that if Anthropic were to cave at this point, it would be completely disastrous for the company. I think the issue of setting yourself up as the good AI company is that the second you falter, the second they said they were going to try and fundraise in the Middle East, [perhaps take Gulf State money](https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-dario-amodei-gulf-state-leaked-memo/), people are very, very quick to call you a hypocrite. And certainly the sources I have at OpenAI are like they’re poised and ready because they are very sick of Dario and the other Anthropic executives essentially saying that they’re better than OpenAI because they’re willing to have values and OpenAI and some of the other companies are not. So I’ll be so curious to see how this plays out, but in my mind, there’s really only one way for Anthropic to play this.

Brian Barrett: There’s a fun timing tidbit I wanted to share that’s sort of related to all of this. I just want to note that a story came out Wednesday that a researcher named Kenneth Payne at King’s College London ran a GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4 and Gemini 3 Flash against each other in war game simulations. Ran a bunch of simulations, like I think hundreds in all, and 95 percent of the time they opted to use nuclear weapons.

Zoë Schiffer: No.

Brian Barrett: They couldn’t get enough of nuclear weapons, so.

Zoë Schiffer: Oh, no.

Leah Feiger: Unbelievable.

Brian Barrett: That’s not to say that that’s what happened in a real world situation, but in terms of is it woke to not use nukes? We’ll find out. Is that woke AI?

Leah Feiger: That’s the title of Brian Barrett’s new book coming at you—

Brian Barrett: It is.

Leah Feiger: Fall 2027.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. Would read, would read, would click.

Leah Feiger: I mean, OK, but play this out with me for just one second. As someone who does not spend a ton of time with AI models in any way, shape, or form, but that makes sense to me, that everything I have seen and everything like inputting, make this better, actually add this to it. Of course, the final scenario here is, you know what? We’re going to just pick the best option. It’s the nukes. This will fully end it. Then we will stop being asked for things. Does that actually make sense? Explain to me why we would even get there.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I think that that’s what alignment is supposed to prevent. The whole idea of alignment is that you’re supposed to bend the AI model in such a way that it conforms to human values and doesn’t do what’s good for the AI necessarily. But I think alignment in and of itself has become seen as kind of woke and companies have been trying to implement the minimum level of guardrails that they can get away with because it’s frankly politically toxic to do otherwise.

Brian Barrett: And when you say alignment with human values, the question is whose values, right? That’s a broad range. And so again, getting back to this, this is the Pentagon saying no, the alignment is with the Department of Defense.

Zoë Schiffer: Right. I have a question for you guys, and I just want to ask it and then I’m going to unpack it.

Brian Barrett: Do it.

Zoë Schiffer: Do you think that you’re agentic or mimetic?

Brian Barrett: Never mind. Don’t do it. Take it back.

Zoë Schiffer: Is it because you’re mimetic?

Brian Barrett: Can you explain what that means before I commit?

Zoë Schiffer: So Silicon Valley has become obsessed with the idea of being agentic, hiring agentic people, and this is in contrast, as you might imagine, to being mimetic. So someone who’s agentic is action-oriented. It’s a person who just does things. They have this inner drive. They just make things happen. They don’t really doubt themselves or the process. In contrast, someone who’s mimetic—I think we can all agree I’m in this category—they are hesitant. They weigh the pros and cons. They kind of wait to see what other people do before they make a move. These questions have come up a lot in job interviews at AI labs. People are kind of trying to test out, are we hiring someone who’s agentic? Are we hiring someone who’s mimetic? And I think the idea is that in a world where AI agents take over vast swaths of the economy, they’re doing a lot of tasks like agentic people will succeed and mimetic people are fucked.

Leah Feiger: This just feels like kind of another Silicon Valley way to describe something that already exists. It’s like when you’re like, oh, are you a kicker or a puncher? These are conversations that have been happening on playgrounds since we were babies. Of course, Silicon Valley took a basically college BuzzFeed personality test, added a couple of extra fun keywords and we’re like, we have figured out a new way to rate people.

Brian Barrett: I think the people who embrace this—is it fair to say—all think of themselves as agentic, right?

Leah Feiger: Without a doubt.

Zoë Schiffer: Oh, for sure. But OK. Here’s funny to me about this. I mean, the reason that this has been kind of taking over Silicon Valley—and Maxwell Zeff, one of our great AI writers, he’s writing about this this week—but there was an essay in Harper’s by Sam Chris that I think kind of went viral last week, and it kind of touched on this idea, kind of chose three people, a few of whom really exemplified agentic tendencies and kind of profiled them, talked about kind of this new world that we are supposedly entering into. My confusion in the piece, in addition to the fact that I think media people tend to over index the importance of things like Slate Star Codex and the guy who started Cluely and the average tech person has no idea what you’re talking about. These are completely irrelevant people, but I’m like, I feel like you’re just saying we like people who are successful, and I’m like, yeah, I mean, don’t we all want to hire people who can get stuff done? I’m a little confused—

Leah Feiger: Are you a self-starter, Zoë?

Zoë Schiffer: Right.

Leah Feiger: That’s what this is. Ugh, God.

Brian Barrett: I also want to say this is not the first time Silicon Valley has been captured by the idea of dividing people into categories. Who can forget the frenzy of early 2022 when everyone was either a wordcel or a shape rotator? Does anyone remember this? Am I the only one?

Zoë Schiffer: I kind of feel like you’re making this up to test if I’m going to agree with. Like I have genuinely no idea what you’re talking about.

Brian Barrett: That’s exactly what a wordcel would say.

Zoë Schiffer: Oh no, I’m mimetic.

Brian Barrett: Sorry.

Zoë Schiffer: And a wordcel.

Brian Barrett: Yeah. Well, they’re very similar concepts, like breaks things down in a similar way. Wordcels are—and I’m not going to get this exactly right, it was a long time ago—but as the name suggests, people who are more language driven and talk through things, whereas shape rotators, wow. They are action-oriented, can probably—

Zoë Schiffer: Where do these words even come from?

Brian Barrett: I don’t know. I think wordcel probably derogatory because it maybe builds off incel, but I am not—I’m making that up as I go along. I don’t remember where it came from exactly, but even Sam Altman was tweeting about wordcels and shape rotators back in the day.

Zoë Schiffer: Well, Sam Altman, as this Harper’s article suggests, is I think a little chronically online. He has a whole section where there was a Twitter troll or an X troll who’s going after people, kind of making fun of them, telling them to buy him things. And Sam Altman kind of makes the trend go mainstream by actually buying this guy a gaming laptop and sending it to him. And then all these other famous tech people feel like they also need to buy this random guy things. It becomes kind of like a trend.

Leah Feiger: I hate that this is a cultural talking point right now. The way that you divide people becoming—it’s just like one more way. One more way.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. Whenever people feel really passionately about the Oxford comma in their bio, they’re like, I’m pro Oxford comma. Like what? Who cares?

Brian Barrett: Oh, so you’re wrong.

Zoë Schiffer: No, no. I mean, I do like it, but I’m like to make your personal brand aligned with the Oxford comma. OK. I don’t know.

Brian Barrett: Wow.

Leah Feiger: She hates the Oxford comma. She’s also mimetic.

Brian Barrett: She’s a wordcel.

Leah Feiger: And she’s a—

Zoë Schiffer: Sorry guys.

Brian Barrett: She’s a mimetic wordcel.

Leah Feiger: OK. I think that we need to move on to another major bit of news that happened this week. The State of the Union address delivered by President Trump on Tuesday evening.

Donald Trump, archival audio: Members of Congress and my fellow Americans, our nation is back—bigger, better, richer, and stronger than ever before.

Leah Feiger: It was the longest State of the Union address to date. It lasted almost two hours, and it was exactly what you would expect. Trump was boasting about his performance in office. He doubled down on immigration.He said the US’s economy was going swimmingly. Did not obviously talk about his very low approval numbers right now, but really spent a lot of time just celebrating the Republican agenda. He brought in members from the US hockey team, celebrating their victory. He talked about immigration and what an important thing this was going to be going into the midterms. He really went after the Supreme Court and after their decision to deny him the tariffs he so deeply wants. It was, honestly, you guys, so boring. I was so bored. What were your reactions? Did you watch? Did you just see the news that came out the next day? Tell me what you’re thinking.

Brian Barrett: I not only watched, I made my kids watch.

Leah Feiger: Oh, that is unkind.

Zoë Schiffer: Oh, my God.

Brian Barrett: Yeah, at least, well, they watched the first hour or so, which is a lot, and then we switched over to an old episode of The Muppet Show as a palate cleanser.

Leah Feiger: Nice.

Brian Barrett: Yeah. I think they got more out of The Muppet Show than they did out of the State of the Union. Other than that, you mentioned he was boosting Republican talking points. I was more struck by how venomous his comments were, vitriolic towards Democrats and anyone he doesn’t like. It was more aggressive than I think we’ve seen on this stage in a long time. It’s not surprising and it’s boring by now, but I think through the eyes of a child who has not watched Donald Trump as much as we have, I think they were pretty shocked by it, that this was how our president acts.

Leah Feiger: And that’s a hundred percent fair. When I say boring, I’m coming at this from, we’re looking at what he’s posting on Truth Social on a daily basis. This is, it’s so much more of the same that perhaps the most complimentary thing I can say is that, while parts of this were just streaming on and on and vaguely nonsensical, he very much stuck to his talking points that he has been saying throughout his term, throughout the last month. Nothing was shocking. He didn’t bring up too many pieces of exact legislation he was going to … but did we actually think he was going to do that? I’m more interested in some of the forward-looking things he promised. Again, of which there were very few, but a couple things that we can look at: for one, he said that JD Vance—Vice President JD Vance—was going to be taking the lead on fraud investigations. Was that new to you guys? How did you feel about that one?

Zoë Schiffer: This is obviously not my area, but my immediate reaction was like, that’s the job you give someone you hate. It just feels like … am I wrong? I’m just like, that feels—

Brian Barrett: Hasn’t the Trump administration also fired, or not rehired, people who resign? They had a bunch of people who were actually responsible for finding and prosecuting fraud who no longer work there, right? So to say, “Oh, well, JD is going to do it,” is a kind of hilarious backup plan. In practice, yeah, that’s not going to go anywhere other than a bunch of posts on X.

Leah Feiger: Oh, yeah. But all to say there wasn’t a ton of new information. I didn’t come out of this going like, “Ah, perfect. I know the day that we will be going to war with Iran,” and so it was very he hit the talking points we thought he was going to hit. And I think, if anything, probably showed, as chaotic as so many different parts of this administration appear, it’s focused.

Zoë Schiffer: Can I ask, it feels a bit like they’re attempting a bit of a rebrand. I’m not sure if this is just because they had so much success being anti-establishment and now they’re the establishment. I know this is well trodden ground, but it feels like Nicki Minaj getting the Trump card and appearing at the White House and all of that, we’re seeing these attempts to say, “No, no, no. We’re still cool. We’re still fun,” like to rebrand MAGA a bit in this moment.

Leah Feiger: The rebrand is not going well, if you’re looking at so many different polling numbers, et cetera, at least in this moment, but it feels like they’re pushing it in some different ways. Brian, what do you think?

Brian Barrett: I don’t know. The point is taken, but rebrand to me feels like it suggests that these cultural touchstones, the US men’s hockey team, other spots, weren’t already MAGA. You know what I mean?

Leah Feiger: So reinvigoration?

Brian Barrett: Maybe.

Leah Feiger: Maybe the word isn’t rebrand, but it feels like they’re talking about things that aren’t just like how much Trump hates immigrants right now.

Brian Barrett: Yeah.

Leah Feiger: There was just a long spread there when they were not, like MAGA was not talking about anything that someone who was not reading the news every single day would be able to relate to.

Brian Barrett: I think that’s fair. Yeah. I think it’s maybe more they are highlighting the pockets of cultural relevance that they have. There is this sort of broader effort of culture capture through the Ellison empire, through the acquisition of TikTok, through the potential acquisition of Warner Brothers by Paramount. So there is a lot of, “We are the cool ones,” which as we all know, the coolest thing you can do is insist to everybody how cool you are. That’s what got me through high school.

Guys, before we go to break, there’s something very near and dear to my heart that WIRED wrote about this week. It’s something I love even more than biathlon. It is undersea internet cables.

Leah Feiger: I love when you talk about this. I think that the first time you brought this up to me was approximately one week into your tenure as executive editor, and you’re like, “Leah, do you know what I love?” and it’s undersea internet cables.

Brian Barrett: Yeah. I was like, “Number one, undersea internet cables. Number two, my children. Number three …” that was sort of the gist of it. That’s how I always introduce myself. I want to take everybody back to December 14th, 1988. The top movie in theaters is Twins starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito.

Zoë Schiffer: Legitimately never heard of it.

Leah Feiger: Wait, Zoë. What?

Brian Barrett: What? Anyway, Arnold is agentic and Danny DeVito’s mimetic. The top song—

Zoë Schiffer: Now I get it.

Brian Barrett: —the top song is “Look Away” by Chicago. Now that, I also am not—I don’t remember that one at all. And the first undersea fiber optic cable connecting the United States, UK and France went live. This was the day that the internet went global, which is crazy—

Zoë Schiffer: That is crazy.

Brian Barrett: —that it was relatively recent. The reason we’re writing about it now is that that original cable, which is called TAT-8, is being pulled up. It’s out of commission. It’s old, it’s decrepit, so I identify, and it’s being pulled up and put out to pasture because the technology’s gotten better. But in this great feature that we published, it is a look at how this changed the world basically, and how we take for granted—but the reason I am so into undersea cable stories is because it’s so easy to forget that the internet is a physical thing and that the maintenance of those things is really what makes all this connectivity happen. So yeah, TAT-8. Any other fond memories of TAT-8? Or, no. What did you guys think reading this feature?

Zoë Schiffer: Well, famously we were not alive in 1988.

Leah Feiger: Yeah. Sorry, Brian. You’re older than us. Just a reminder.

Brian Barrett: Hurts.

Zoë Schiffer: But the part of this story that I wanted to talk about, which felt like a real intersection of both of your interests was the myth of the shark attacks.

Brian Barrett: Oh, yeah.

Leah Feiger: OK. So to back up a little bit, these cables, at the very beginning, when they were put in, Brian would be able to talk about this way more because he’s kind of a freak about cables if you haven’t realized already. These cables would sometimes have unexplained damage, and looking back on it years later, engineers figured out that this kind of happens, that if you are putting cables underseas, there will be wind, there will be changes, things will get moved around. Of course, there will be damages, but that is not how they felt at the time. These engineers assumed that it was sharks, that sharks were biting their cables, that they were destroying the internet. The cables were reinforced with all these protective layers, all of these things, because they were like, “Oh, my God, the sharks are quite literally ending all of this for us.” But this article goes into great detail of how they figured out it wasn’t the sharks, and by thinking that it was the sharks, it actually helped make all of this technology that much better and stronger, but the sharks were innocent, you guys. The sharks were innocent.

Brian Barrett: Justice for sharks. If there’s one thing this podcast is about, it is justice for sharks.

Leah Feiger: They’re so wonderful. They didn’t disrupt the cables, but it is such an interesting thing, because obviously this piece, it gets into so much of the physical building of all of this and having to grapple with the natural world, and changing currents and temperatures and what does that look like.

Zoë Schiffer: This is still how it runs, right? Satellites and wireless networks are there, they’re relevant, but the actual physical cables, this is still the backbone of the internet.

Brian Barrett: And they’re still being deployed. I think Google and Meta both have their own giant undersea cable projects. They’re still launching new ones, faster connections, and they’re also very political. I think in 2024 there was a spate of severed undersea cables that people have traced back to, allegedly, Russia severing ties to Finland, Estonia, as this was around the time that the EU was just gearing up to support Ukraine, and there was a little bit of like infrastructure mayhem going on at the bottom of the ocean. These are integral to all kinds of geopolitical—and again, that wasn’t sharks, so it’s another time the sharks didn’t do it.

Coming up after the break, we’ll share our WIRED/TIRED picks for the week. Stay with us.

Zoë Schiffer: It is time for our WIRED/TIRED segment. Whatever is new and cool is WIRED. Whatever is passé is TIRED. Are we ready?

Leah Feiger: So ready, so excited. Wow.

Zoë Schiffer: OK. Leah, you go first.

Leah Feiger: So my WIRED is the show Survivor, which is airing Wednesday night. So excited. This is going to be incredible. It is Season 50, so we have Survivor players of eons past that are coming back to compete for the million dollars. I am so excited. It’s going to be incredible. Zoë, my goal in the next few months is just to make you watch one, one, of the episodes. This is very important to me.

Brian Barrett: If you were to make Zoë watch a historical episode of Survivor in isolation, what one hour of Survivor would you show her?

Leah Feiger: Can I say a season, or does it have to be an episode?

Brian Barrett: I want to go with that, because I don’t think you’re going to get her for a whole season.

Leah Feiger: So I’m going to do the second-to-last episode of the Micronesia season of Survivor. Absolutely incredible season, known for the Black Widow Brigade. Zoë, I actually think you would really like it. Well, anyway, that is my WIRED. My TIRED—and I’m kind of devastated to say this—is Love Is Blind, which is … I know that my theme was reality shows this week. Look, I have a lot of I wouldn’t say love for Love Is Blind, but I have a lot of interest in Love Is Blind. I am an avid Love Is Blind watcher. I think it is a super interesting concept and a very weird show, and produces a lot of very weird people. But there is a excellent WIRED article coming out about how MAGA it’s gotten, and that those are the people that are going on the show right now, and the conversations that are happening between these couples who met behind a wall and are off to get married several weeks after knowing each other, the conversations are quite sad. They’re making me sad. There’s a lot of body shaming and it’s just very—it’s weird. So this season, it’s not doing it for me, which that’s OK because Survivor is here to lift me out of the doldrums. That is my WIRED and TIRED. I stand by it. I swear that I read books and stuff too. I do not want this to be my only brand on this show.

Zoë Schiffer: Certainly not. Brian, drag us out. I need to get on firmer ground.

Brian Barrett: OK. Well, I’m going to go TIRED. Samsung just announced some new phones. Those aren’t TIRED, but TIRED is AI overload in phones. There’s too much. So at this point, the new Samsung Galaxy S26 smartphones—similar to Google’s conversational photo editor—they have a photo assist thing that lets you use natural language, so you can just type in. If you have a photo that you took, you can say like, “Hey, give my dog a party hat,” and then there will be a party hat on the dog. What’s the point of taking photos anymore? Why not just prompt something instead from scratch, or just go touch some grass? I am curious about—they’ve got agents built into the phone, so you can use the phone. You can just say, “Hey, order me a pizza,” and the phone will just do that for you. We’ll see if it works. I don’t know. It seems like it might go off the rails. Anyway, too much too soon for me. That’s my TIRED. I didn’t plan a WIRED. I was so caught up on the phone, but because it came up earlier, I’ll say the new Muppet Show episode with Sabrina Carpenter is really quite good, and I hope that it got a good enough response that Disney makes more of them.

Zoë Schiffer: Further proving that I’m barely on the internet, but I really like this. OK, my TIRED is—this is what I wrote, “Calling yourself a bestselling author.” I just don’t know what it means anymore when someone talks about this, but I did pick up my first Agatha Christie book the other day. I’ve never read her. Flip to the back and her author bio, you guys, says, “Agatha Christie is a bestselling author, blah, blah, blah, has been only outsold by the Bible and Shakespeare,” and I thought, “Boss move, lady.”

Leah Feiger: Agatha’s incredible. Wait, did you start reading? Which book is it?

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I’m reading And Then There Were None, which previously had a more offensive title that I think was changed.

Brian Barrett: Oh, it sure did.

Leah Feiger: Yeah, it really did. I went through an Agatha Christie—

Brian Barrett: Don’t Google it.

Leah Feiger: Yeah, no need. I went through a really intense Agatha Christie phase in high school. I really think that you’re going to enjoy this.

Zoë Schiffer: I’m having fun.

Leah Feiger: Wait, what’s your TIRED?

Zoë Schiffer: I said TIRED is calling yourself a bestselling author. WIRED is being Agatha Christie and being like, “I’m actually the most bestselling author of all time.” You get it?

Brian Barrett: I get it.

Zoë Schiffer: It wasn’t great.

Leah Feiger: Yeah, I get it. I accept it. Yeah, that’s fine.

Brian Barrett: It was—you know what? It was mimetic.

Leah Feiger: It was so mimetic. My God. That is our show for today. We’ll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. If you have any comments, you can find the episode transcripts at WIRED.com to discuss. Uncanny Valley is produced by Kaleidoscope Content. Adriana Tapia produced this episode. It was mixed by Amar Lal at Macro Sound. It was fact-checked by Matt Giles. Jake Lummus is our New York studio engineer. Kate Osborn is our executive producer, and Katie Drummond is WIRED’s Global Editorial Director.