Uncanny Valley (WIRED Podcast) | Full Refined Episode Transcript & Official Show Notes

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Episode Overview

This week on WIRED’s hit tech and culture podcast Uncanny Valley, co-hosts Brian Barrett (WIRED Executive Editor) and Leah Feiger (WIRED Politics & Science Director) sit down with WIRED Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond to unpack the months-long top-secret process that led to her viral, widely discussed cover interview with Nathan Fielder for his new documentary You Can See Everything. The team also breaks down the sudden, uncoordinated wave of flashy philanthropic pledges from the tech world, and dives into WIRED’s exclusive investigative findings of a nationwide harassment campaign targeting U.S. election offices just two weeks before midterm elections.

Host Profiles & Contact

• Follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky: @brbarrett

• Follow Katie Drummond on Bluesky: @katie-drummond

• Follow Leah Feiger on Bluesky: @leahfeiger

• Send feedback, topic suggestions or questions to the team at [email protected]

Referenced Articles Featured In This Episode

1. Nathan Fielder Tells Us Everything (the viral WIRED cover feature)

2. How Elizabeth Holmes Tricked WIRED—and Everyone Else

3. Election Offices in at Least 32 States Have Received Suspicious Letters

4. They Fled Trump’s America. Now They Regret It

Subscription & Listening Guide

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• On iPhone or iPad: Open the native Apple Podcasts app, or tap this direct link to the show page

• On third-party podcast players including Overcast or Pocket Casts: Search for "Uncanny Valley" to find and subscribe

• The full show catalog is also available to stream on Spotify.

Transcript Note: This is a manually polished edit of the original automated episode transcript, with all generation errors corrected for clarity.

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Full Episode Conversation

Brian Barrett: Well, welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley. I'm Brian Barrett, executive editor.

Leah Feiger: And I'm Leah Feiger, director of politics and science. This week, we're diving into the full behind-the-scenes of our viral Nathan Fielder interview. WIRED's global editorial director, Katie Drummond, was among a tiny group of people who saw Fielder's latest documentary, You Can See Everything, long before its public release. She spoke with Fielder at length for our cover, and will be joining us to share what stayed with her after their conversation wrapped.

Brian Barrett: We'll also dig into two head-turning announcements from tech power players this week: Anthropic pledged to commit 5 percent of all its company shares to a public benefit fund, and Elon Musk quickly followed suit by promising he would give one SpaceX share to every child in America. We'll break down the unstated motivations behind these pledges, and how likely either is to actually be fulfilled.

Leah Feiger: And we're also going to unpack the coordinated harassment campaign that hit election offices across the country just two weeks before the midterms. A WIRED investigation found election offices in at least 32 states received suspicious unsolicited letters, some of which contained unidentified white powder. We'll talk through exactly what unfolded, and how overstretched election officials are responding.

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(The full discussion runs through Katie Drummond's story of signing an NDA to access the secret Nathan Fielder project, her experience interviewing a famously press-shy Fielder who kept trying to turn the tables and interview her, the aftermath of the viral interview that led to AI search results falsely labeling Katie a felon, the team's reckoning with WIRED's early 2010s fawning coverage of Theranos, their deep dive into the self-serving logic behind big tech's last-minute philanthropic gestures, the details of the election office targeted letter campaign, and wrap up with their weekly Wired/Tired segment covering everything from expats underestimating the challenges of moving to Europe, to a viral Snoopy iPhone wallpaper, Halloween nostalgia, and widespread unpatched PHP web vulnerabilities.)

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Episode Production Credits

• Episode produced by Adriana Tapia

• Audio mixed by Pran Bandi

• Fact-checking by Matt Giles

• Executive producer: Kate Osborn

• Global editorial director: Katie Drummond