All posts tagged: uncanny valley podcast

‘Uncanny Valley’: Iran’s Threats on US Tech, Trump’s Plans for Midterms, and Polymarket’s Pop-up Flop

‘Uncanny Valley’: Iran’s Threats on US Tech, Trump’s Plans for Midterms, and Polymarket’s Pop-up Flop

Published by skeptic

Kate Knibbs: So, you went twice? Makena Kelly: Yes, Kate. I went twice. Kate Knibbs: I missed that. Zoë Schiffer: Wait, is the Pentagon Pizza thing a joke about the pizza predicting the war? Makena Kelly: Yeah. Zoë Schiffer: Oh, my God. Makena Kelly: Because they had these Pentagon pizza trackers up. When I returned the second night, yes, I came back the second night. Everything was working for the most part. There were still some screens that were turned off, but I never saw any actual Bloomberg terminals. There were some monitory Bloomberg type terminal things that it looked like Polymarket had developed themselves, but the real $50,000 Bloomberg terminal was nowhere to be found. And yeah, the second night, again, it was mostly people looking to gawk at the event, except I did find a couple of people who placed some bets on platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi. One was named William, and he said he was a member of the military, wouldn’t give me his full name. And he last year got …

Duolingo’s Luis von Ahn Wants to Delete the Blockchain

Duolingo’s Luis von Ahn Wants to Delete the Blockchain

Published by skeptic

Luis von Ahn could have retired to a beach somewhere years ago. Best known as the CEO of the learning app Duolingo, von Ahn in the early 2000s invented the captcha, those infuriating little online tests that force people to prove they’re not robots. But after selling his creation to Google in 2009, von Ahn didn’t waste any time launching his next venture: a company borne of his experience growing up in Guatemala, one that’s now among the most prominent education platforms in the world. Von Ahn’s mom, a doctor, spent all of her extra income to send him to private school, giving von Ahn opportunities that most of his peers never saw. It is, as he tells me in this week’s Big Interview, the reason he founded Duolingo more than a decade ago, with the goal of making high-quality education free and widely available. Today, the company reaches more than 130 million users worldwide, from immigrants learning new languages to celebrities like George Clooney. Inequality may have inspired von Ahn, but his company now …

Chris Hayes Has Some Advice for Keeping Up With the News

Chris Hayes Has Some Advice for Keeping Up With the News

Published by skeptic

Chris Hayes makes a living from attention: What deserves some, what doesn’t, and how to make sure the public gives their own limited span of it to the right things. That sounds simple enough. But as I found during my conversation with Hayes, which kicks off season two of The Big Interview podcast, it’s increasingly not. In 2025, the host of MS Now’s All In With Chris Hayes released The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource—a book whose central thesis argues that attention has become the defining commodity of modern life. In keeping with that theme, Hayes himself is everywhere audiences spend time: opining on TV, hosting a podcast called Why Is This Happening?, interacting with his thousands of followers on social networks, and posting vertical videos there as well. In other words, Hayes is both adept at considering the attention economy from an intellectual perch and is participating in it as an attention merchant himself. That’s specifically why I wanted to talk to Hayes, and talk to him right now. …

‘Uncanny Valley’: Nvidia’s ‘Super Bowl of AI,’ Tesla Disappoints, and Meta’s VR Metaverse ‘Shutdown’

‘Uncanny Valley’: Nvidia’s ‘Super Bowl of AI,’ Tesla Disappoints, and Meta’s VR Metaverse ‘Shutdown’

Published by skeptic

This week on Uncanny Valley, hosts Brian Barrett and Zoë Schiffer discuss the highlights from Nvidia’s annual developer conference, and why Tesla recently got in trouble with some of its most loyal fans online. Plus, Meta’s initial decision to shut down Horizon Worlds VR on the Quest headset signals the end of the metaverse dream. (Meta has since reversed course, saying it will keep the platform on limited support for the “foreseeable future.”) Articles mentioned in this episode: You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett and Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer. Write to us at [email protected]. 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, …

‘Uncanny Valley’: Anthropic’s DOD Lawsuit, War Memes, and AI Coming for VC Jobs

‘Uncanny Valley’: Anthropic’s DOD Lawsuit, War Memes, and AI Coming for VC Jobs

Published by skeptic

Brian Barrett: The irony is my favorite part because I feel like venture capitalists have largely positioned themselves as immune to the effects of AI because they’re very special and surely a machine can— Zoë Schiffer: It’s art, not science. Brian Barrett: Yeah. It’s art, not science. Machines can take every job, but not us. The ladder stops just below VC for them in a way that is entertaining and fun. So I wonder how many people are actually using this now, especially because venture capitalists themselves are so skeptical of it, it seems like. Who’s the audience? Is it finding real traction out there? Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. So the way that ADIN works is they have scouts that go out and look for potential deals, and then those scouts can make money on said deals. So I think this would be something where VCs wouldn’t necessarily be adopting the network, but people would be going around them and they wouldn’t be as necessary, as useful. I think there was another great irony, which Arielle …

‘Uncanny Valley’: Iran War in the AI Era, Prediction Market Ethics, and Paramount Beats Netflix

‘Uncanny Valley’: Iran War in the AI Era, Prediction Market Ethics, and Paramount Beats Netflix

Published by skeptic

Zoë Schiffer: Emil Michael, you should turn off your views on LinkedIn because people can see when they look at your phone. Brian Barrett: Yeah, that’s a tip for Emil Michael if you’re listening. And then, if you listen to Uncanny Valley, which you should. Leah Feiger: And this is really the Trump official that’s kind of leading the war against Anthropic here. He has these deep ties to the tech world and he’s the Pentagon’s public enemy number one of anyone who’s trying to cross the Pentagon. So the fact that, one, he has not maybe the best op sec in the world? But two, is comfortable making this such a public battle, is very much something to take note because it’s not just a message to Anthropic in my mind. It’s a message to anyone else who would dare question these policies. Brian Barrett: I want to go to something top of mind. Have you all checked your Kalshi or Polymarket portfolios lately? How are we doing? Leah Feiger: Well, I haven’t invested …

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

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

Published by skeptic

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” …

‘Uncanny Valley’: ICE’s Secret Expansion Plans, Palantir Workers’ Ethical Concerns, and AI Assistants

‘Uncanny Valley’: ICE’s Secret Expansion Plans, Palantir Workers’ Ethical Concerns, and AI Assistants

Published by skeptic

Brian Barrett: They’ve got 80 billion or so to spend 75 billion of that I think they have to spend in the next four years. So yeah, they’re going to keep expanding. And when you think of how much of an impact 3000 agents officers had in Minneapolis alone, that’s like an eighth of the, they can repeat some version of that in a lot of different spots. Leah Feiger: And I’ve been fielding, honestly, shout out to the many local reporters around the country who’ve been contacting me in the last day or so, just to ask questions about the locations that we named that are near them or in their states or cities. And the thing to me that keeps coming up is that in addition to new buildings, they’re getting put into preexisting government buildings, preexisting leases, or that that appears to be the plan. And then we’ve also found that a bunch of these ICE offices are being located near plans for giant immigration detention warehouses, and we’re looking at offices …

‘Uncanny Valley’: Tech Elites in the Epstein Files, Musk’s Mega Merger, and a Crypto Scam Compound

‘Uncanny Valley’: Tech Elites in the Epstein Files, Musk’s Mega Merger, and a Crypto Scam Compound

Published by skeptic

Leah Feiger: Talking about him. Yeah. Absolutely. Brian Barrett: Yeah. It’s just this web. It fills out this web. Leah Feiger: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, these are the tech titans. Brian Barrett: Yeah. Up until as recently as 2019, I think some of these people were actively in touch. Leah Feiger: Wow. So speaking of Elon, he was also in the news this week for an entirely different thing, aka rolling xAI into SpaceX, officially creating the world’s most valuable private company. We’ve got to talk about that. Brian Barrett: Yeah. And I know that you love … This combines your two favorite things. Leah Feiger: Oh, yes. Absolutely. Brian Barrett: AI and Elon Musk. Leah Feiger: Uh-huh. Brian Barrett: Leah, could I also interest you in a potential third favorite thing? Leah Feiger: Oh, hit me, Brian. Brian Barrett: Can I interest you in data centers in space? Leah Feiger: So that’s what he’s promising, right? Brian Barrett: Yeah. Leah Feiger: I’m actually very interested in data centers. Brian Barrett: …