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Article: ‘Uncanny Valley’: AI Researcher Resignations, Bots Hiring Humans, and Evie Magazine’s Party

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This week's podcast episode covers three main stories. Zoë Schiffer reports on AI safety concerns leading to researcher resignations at top companies. Brian Barrett discusses the controversial Rent-A-Human website where AI agents hire people for tasks.

Leah Feiger shares insights from attending a party for the conservative magazine Evie and its potential cultural influence on the election. The hosts also encourage listener reviews and provide contact information.

The main topics covered are AI ethics and safety, the intersection of AI and human labor, and the cultural impact of political media.

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https://www.wired.com/story/uncanny-valley-podcast-ai-researcher-resignations-bots-hiring-humans-evie-magazines-party/

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Business Latest

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2026-02-23 19:28

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2026-03-04 14:34

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2026-03-04 14:59

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Raw Extracted Content

This week, Zoë Schiffer dives into why some researchers at top AI companies have been resigning and publicly voicing their concerns about AI safety. Brian Barrett tells us why Rent-A-Human—a website where AI agents hire humans to perform various tasks—has gathered attention and controversy. Leah Feiger shares her experience attending a party for the conservative magazine Evie, and how the culture around the publication could shape the upcoming election cycle.
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.
Articles mentioned in this episode:
- OpenAI Staffer Quits, Alleging Company’s Economic Research Is Drifting Into AI Advocacy
- The Rise of RentAHuman, the Marketplace Where Bots Put People to Work
- I Tried RentAHuman, Where AI Agents Hired Me to Hype Their AI Startups
- Burnt Hair and Soft Power: A Night Out With Evie Magazine
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.
How did everybody spend their three-day weekend?
Leah Feiger: Brian, I obviously saw Wuthering Heights.
Brian Barrett: Obviously.
Zoë Schiffer: Wait, was it really bad? I saw that post that was like—
Leah Feiger: Nope. Everyone's wrong.
Zoë Schiffer: … Charlotte Bronte died from tuberculosis.
Leah Feiger: Emily, this was an Emily Bronte joint … it was her only book.
Brian Barrett: First of all, Zoë.
Zoë Schiffer: I'm actually ashamed because this book was an important part of my early adulthood.
Leah Feiger: When I first read this book at age 14, 15, whatever it was, I was like, this is trash. This is poorly written. This story is bad. It's jumping around timeframe. This is not good. This is not … and I specifically remember talking to whatever teacher assigned it, and I was like, “You shouldn't assign bad books.” It was a whole thing—
Zoë Schiffer: Leah was an editor even then.
Brian Barrett: This is a lot of insight into middle school, Leah.
Leah Feiger: Everyone's still working through it, myself, my parents.
Brian Barrett: None of it surprising, none of it surprising, but just—
Zoë Schiffer: She's like, I brought you another syllabus. Have you thought about this instead?
Leah Feiger: Yes, all sounds right. Shout out to any teachers, hopefully not listening to this show, but all to say, I went into this being like, I am here for Jacob Elordi, and Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie alone, and these beautiful shots of the moors. Who doesn't love a misty moor?
Brian Barrett: Love a moor.
Leah Feiger: Love a moor. I love the moor. It had nothing to do with the book, which is fantastic, because like I said, the book was terrible, and it was perfect. It was a perfect movie. They should win an award for set design.
Zoë Schiffer: OK, I'm just going to say Leah speaks for herself, Uncanny Valley is not anti-Wuthering Heights, the book, but we can move on.
Brian Barrett: I am happy to be Switzerland in this situation. I have no feelings about Wuthering Heights.
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.
Zoë Schiffer: So one thing that has been very much on my mind the past week, but honestly it feels like the past year, is that we keep seeing this trend of top researchers, researchers at the top AI companies, resigning and often quitting in these very public ways. So last week a former Open AI researcher, Zoe Hitzig, wrote an op-ed for The New York Times basically saying that she was leaving the company because she had deep, deep reservations about how Open AI was going to be rolling out ads. Did you guys see this op-ed? I thought it was actually quite interesting.
Leah Feiger: As we all know, AI is perhaps not my favorite topic. It's not the topic I gravitate towards in my news consumption, but I love gossip. I read this and was like, “I need to know what Zoë thinks, immediately.” Because like you said, everyone's doing this. It's not enough to quit your job. It's not enough to have a cute little LinkedIn post anymore. You have to tell the entire world why your company is, in fact, going to ravage human existence altogether.
Zoë Schiffer: Right? Right. But oftentimes I will say they leave it a little bit more mysterious. You'll see a long goodbye note that they obviously post on X or wherever else, and they'll say like, “I'm leaving because I couldn't follow my values,” it'll be something kind of vague. This one was not vague. This one was like, “We are rolling out ads. We're prioritizing kind of the business model over these other values and I'm uncomfortable with it.” And one thing that I thought was cool is that she actually offered solutions. So basically she laid out a couple options, because she admits that AI is very, very expensive. It makes sense to want to try and monetize it in some way to offset the costs. She was like, “Well, a subsidy model could be an option. We could also have ads, but then also have an independent oversight board.” LOL. That's like worked very well for Meta.
Brian Barrett: Well, the Meta thing is really … the direct comparison to Facebook I thought was really interesting in a lot of ways. Both for what she explicitly says of their concerns around trying to monetize user data in these sensitive spaces, is a bad road to go down. Every social media platform has gone down this road. AI shouldn't do the same thing. It also, again, ring the bell, I get to say “enshittification” again, which is less of her concern, but it is something where ads will inherently, I think, degrade this experience in a way. However safely or responsibly you put them in at first, if this is the way you're going, they're going to become more intrusive. They're going to become more reliant on these ads. So it is a combination of a worse experience for the user, both in terms of their exposure and in terms of their actual day-to-day what they got out of this thing.
Leah Feiger: I wonder if Anthropic’s Super Bowl ad team is taking this as just an entire win.
Zoë Schiffer: So I was literally just going to say, you know, who agrees with Brian Barrett? Anthropic, because they had a Super Bowl ad that seemed to directly attack OpenAI on this very point.
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Brian Barrett: Also a very sneaky way to get Anthropic, to get WIRED Uncanny Valley to run their ad.
Leah Feiger: We did.
Zoë Schiffer: I know.
Leah Feiger: We're not even getting paid for this.
Zoë Schiffer: I thought that ad was really funny, personally.
Brian Barrett: I'll say the same thing I said in Slack when Anthropic said that they weren't doing ads, and they said they were doing the Super Bowl commercial, which is, I look forward to checking back on this in 18 months.
Zoë Schiffer: 100 percent. 100 percent.
Brian Barrett: When they have completely either backtracked or have collapsed.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I feel like Anthropic is doing a couple things that we see happen on the internet frequently, and they always end badly. One is that it's like, the content moderation run where every company starts out and they're like, “We're for free speech,” and then, oh my gosh, people start posting CSAM or illegal content or whatever and they're like, “OK, OK, we're for free speech, but except for these things,” and then whatever. They all seem to end up in the very same place, no matter how high-minded they start out. It's like Anthropic is the “good” AI company, in quotes. They've really positioned themselves as the one that is never going to roll out ads, never going to let their AI be used in these bad use cases. And yet we see that they're fundraising from Gulf states. They are taking money. It's expensive to create this technology, and I think that when you think, as many Anthropic leaders seem to, that AI is going to result in, it's going to be the tide that lifts all boats. You're willing to make compromises along the way to make that happen.
Leah Feiger: Where do the people who leave these companies, either citing ethical concerns or internal squabbles, where are they going? Is this just like, are we just jumping ship, actually to the ship right next door? What are the differences here that we're really looking at?
Brian Barrett: I'm curious as to Zoë's thoughts here. My impression is that it's a bit of a revolving door. You go to Anthropic, and then you leave Anthropic, and you go somewhere else that's super … you just keep hopping over to somewhere that has your quote, unquote, “values” until you feel like they don't anymore, and then you just cash a check somewhere else. Is that fair to say?
Zoë Schiffer: I think that that's basically it. Yeah. I mean, I think researchers tend to come from academia, and I think, more so than some of the other positions that we see at these companies, they are very values-driven people. They have a lot of ideals that they come in the door with, and then I think they realize, oh shit, we're just working for a tech company and that tech company … I always thought it was very telling when people would say, “Well, Meta puts profits over people.” It's like—
Leah Feiger: So does everyone.
Zoë Schiffer: Yes, that is the definition of a for-profit enterprise.
Brian Barrett: Publicly traded.
Zoë Schiffer: Right, but it's also, I think, fair to say that with AI companies, as with social media companies a decade ago, the way that they talk about what they're doing is not in terms of just trying to make money for shareholders. It's a much loftier vision of what they're doing and why.
Leah Feiger: Well, it's a claim that it's entirely mission-driven, but even with that, didn't Anthropic have someone who left recently as well?
Zoë Schiffer: That was one of those notes that was very vague, and we were like, OK, well, I mean every time this happens, I think Brian and me are both in Slack being like, “Can someone find out what's going on here? What does it mean that you couldn't pursue your values at Anthropic?”
Brian Barrett: There's just so much drama inside these companies, both related to this and related to everything else. It is remarkable how much money they have to burn and how consequential their products are, given the levels of dysfunction that we're seeing. And that's just what we know, and we know a lot because it's so dysfunctional, but man, messy in there.
Zoë Schiffer: I know. It's interesting because reportedly OpenAI is gearing up to go public in the next year. There's a lot that needs to happen behind the scenes for the company to be ready for that, to be ready for that level of scrutiny. But I think this is also, at least in terms of advertising, this is something that Fidji Simo, who's the CEO of applications at OpenAI, has been really concerned with, because she was brought over after she was the CEO of Instacart, but before that, spent years and years at Meta, working quite closely with Mark Zuckerberg, and people were really nervous when she joined OpenAI, that she was going to kind of run the Meta playbook at their “little” AI lab. I'm putting little in quotes too. I spoke to her a few months ago. It sounded like she was trying to be quite thoughtful about this, but I think this is a point that both Fidji and OpenAI at large is very sensitive about. Being the bad AI company, being the one that's running at enshittification faster than its competitors. I think Anthropic is kind of hitting it where it hurts with that ad, and so, frankly, is this researcher who penned the letter in The New York Times.
Brian Barrett: And we're still just a few weeks or so away from OpenAI going to adult companionship with AI models, right? They're doing the speed run. Speaking of lofty goals in AI, I do want to ask Zoë and Leah, have you all heard of the website, RentAHuman?
Zoë Schiffer: Unfortunately, yes.
Leah Feiger: Yeah, and I didn't want to know that our AI overlords had already figured out how to rent us. I mean, explain this further, please, Brian, but that's the gist of it. They figured out how to have us do their tasks for them.
Brian Barrett: Yeah, I mean it's right there in the name, it's RentAHuman, and it's a site where AI agents can hire human beings to do all of those things in the real world that they can't do because they are AI. The tasks range from the ridiculous to the more ridiculous. Someone was offering … by someone, I mean, some it, some AI agent, was offering someone 30 bucks an hour to count pigeons in Washington, DC, another delivering CBD gummies for $75 an hour. All of this is just things, again, that a disembodied AI agent cannot do. There's still a human behind them who set up the agent in the first place, but then the agent pays the human to do the thing. There are 4 million visits on this site, over half a million users, and by users I mean people who said, “Yes, please. I would like to do the bidding of a bot and get paid for it,” and it's only growing from here.
Leah Feiger: Rent me.
Brian Barrett: Yeah. It's basically, if you're familiar with Fiverr, it's Fiverr, but with bots.
Zoë Schiffer: But OK. We have to have a caveat in here, because the article lays out in meticulous detail, how a lot of these jobs, the writer was applying to them and not hearing back. When he actually got a job, it seemed like the job was just a marketing ploy for an AI startup. What is actually going on?
Brian Barrett: Our colleague, Reese Rogers, actually rented himself out as a human, and wrote about it on WIRED, and yeah, his experience was exactly what you said. He had a hard time getting a gig to begin with. By the time he finally got one, it was transparently a marketing gig, and he didn't get paid that much for it. He felt kind of used. I think part of that, though, is a function of so many humans want to do this. It's maybe not surprising that I think there's more humans that want to do this than bots that want to assign.
Zoë Schiffer: Isn't this just about the state of the economy right now, though? I'm like, if we're thinking this is a new form of gig work, and people want it as just a way to make money on the side, is it not a sign that people are unable to find jobs in other areas?
Leah Feiger: Probably, right? I mean, how many other gig work apps can you sign yourself up for? Every time that I talk to an Uber driver, they're like, “Yes, I'm also a Lyft driver and I do Postmates and I do this and this and this.” And then, I don't know, the RentAHuman, as much as that it appears to be this bizarro publicity stunt. Who knows where it could go from here? I keep thinking about people that are like, “Wait, hold on. Now AI is supposed to be doing the art for us while we do their menial tasks?” That is the final direction of this, in my very doomer mindset.
Brian Barrett: I think what's a little bit, well, there's a lot that's kind of silly about all this, but what seems extra silly to me is that AI agents, if not right now, the direction we're headed is they're just going to use Fiverr. They're just going to use Amazon Prime. They're just going to use these existing infrastructure sites. On [inaudible] you don't need a separate site that's just for bots. Bots are going to be roaming the web, or agents are going to be roaming the web freely, so it's a taste of what's to come in a centralized form with a goofy name, but ultimately I think it is a look at, what's more troubling to me, a future where you don't know if you're being assigned by a bot or by an agent or not. You don't know what's on the other end of that line.
Zoë Schiffer: OK. Well, as someone who took, once, the practice test for the LSAT a single time when I debated going to law school, I have to ask, who is liable if you get hurt on your little bot task job? If you mess something up and someone else gets hurt? Are we talking about the bot being liable? I feel like there's an interesting legal question here.
Leah Feiger: The bot is an individual though, right? I'm sorry. This is right. They're still being sent out, and even given the instructions to assign someone to these varying tasks, so surely it would be whatever business, whatever AI startup, whatever crypto wallet something that is encouraging people to count Washington's pigeons.
Zoë Schiffer: Crypto wallet something. You heard it here first folks.
Leah Feiger: Crypto wallet is on the brain, because you need a crypto wallet to get paid for tasks by RentAHuman.
Zoë Schiffer: That was a huge red flag to me.
Brian Barrett: Are we shocked that there's a crypto tie-in?
Leah Feiger: There has to be a crypto tie-in. There's always a crypto tie-in.
Brian Barrett: I will say we also talked to the founders of RentAHuman, 26-year-old Argentinian software engineer, Alexander Liteplo, and his cofounder, Patricia Tani. Would it surprise either of you to know, again, that this website was vibe-coded, in a day, by an AI agent?
Zoë Schiffer: That makes so much sense.
Brian Barrett: It's agents all the way down.
Leah Feiger: All right. I'm removing AI from the chat, you guys. This is way too much for me today. I feel like I was an incredible sport about the last 20 minutes of my life. Thank you so much. And to be clear, these are all really, really important stories, but I want to talk about a very different story that I think could have maybe not as much of an impact as AI on the rest of the world, but a sizable cultural and political impact, nonetheless. Let's get into the midterms, and more specific—
Brian Barrett: Wait, Leah, it's so early. It's February. Do we have to?
Zoë Schiffer: I also feel like you made us do this two weeks ago.
Leah Feiger: OK. But this is a really different way into it. So polls are not looking great for the GOP. In the last couple of weeks we've seen a number of issues not track super well, whether that was ICE's invasion of Minneapolis, economy, as we have been talking about, not so great no matter what President Donald Trump says. So in classic Republican fashion they have backups on backups on backups. We have the Manosphere on one side, which is plugging away. We have our hearty podcasters that WIRED has been covering for a long, long time, but I want to look a little bit at a different side of this, and how Republicans are appealing to young women right now. And that's Evie Magazine, which is a digital and print magazine with conservative women as their main audience target. They have quite literally called themselves the Conservative Cosmo before. They were founded in 2019, and the entire point was to have an alternative. It was this idea that conservative women were sitting down reading Marie Claire and Vogue and Cosmo and being like, “Stop throwing your liberal ideas at me amidst these makeup ads.” And I'm totally serious. And so you have Evie Magazine, which, if you're scrolling through, they're online right now, you see things that are like, is this actually political? It's articles like Seven Questions to Ask Early If You Want a Serious Relationship, or How to Dress like Olivia Dean on a Budget, but so much of it is a classic example of soft power in action. This is, so many of the other articles running alongside are like, critiques of birth control or women sharing experiences about why having sex before marriage actually doomed all of their relationships. It's this very interesting space that's actually been picking up quite a bit of attention. You have Republicans across the spectrum that are pretty obsessed with it. Candace Owens, Steve Bannon, and Brett Cooper, a conservative commentator, all champion Evie. So Brett Cooper and I actually have something really important in common, you guys. We were both at Evie Magazine's very first live event on Sunday night in New York City. This was their live event at New York Fashion Week. It was held at the Standard Hotel's Boom, in Chelsea, and it was so bizarre. I wrote an article about it. Did you read it? Tell me what you think.
Zoë Schiffer: I read it. The detail about the room smelling like burnt hair really got me. That was—
Brian Barrett: Very evocative.
Zoë Schiffer: … very evocative. I felt like I was there. I was also, because I've read a profile on Brett Cooper a while back, and I was very curious what she's like in person?
Leah Feiger: Many of the women at this event gave off the appearance of trying really, really hard to look very, very glamorous and very, very with-it, and very, very much at this function that was, in quotes, “attempting to celebrate the romantic era.” It wasn't inherently political. That's the wild thing. If you walked in off the street, you were not going to go, “Oh, this is conservatism.”
Zoë Schiffer: We're not talking about MAGA hats or whatever.
Leah Feiger: No, no, no, no, no, no. If you're talking conservatism, you're talking like Sydney Sweeney rather than ICE patrolling streets. That was more the vibe, which is really important, because that's actually how they're winning hearts and minds here. This is soft power.
Brian Barrett: I have a chicken and an egg question here, which is that there was clearly a market for this, because it's doing well, so how much of Evie, and they've been around for seven years or so and growing, how much of their success, is they've just tapped into a market that didn't have a magazine like this, but they always wanted one? And how much of it is they are winning people over to conservatism who wouldn't have otherwise been there?
Leah Feiger: I think it's both. I really think it's both. Talking to the people that were at the party, I talked to conservative commentators who certainly were conservative long before Evie was founded and will be around long after the internet. But what I was also taken with were random young women who were like, “No, I really like the aesthetic. I love their soft focus photography. I love their focus on these models, and also they have great celebrity content.” So it was really running the gamut here, but to be entirely clear, there is no way to actually separate Evie from politics, like, the magazine traffics in conspiracy theories, shares anti-vaccine content, has tradwife inspo, like, every other article. Remember Ballerina Farm? They helped bring it into a lot of the main sphere. They have articles about rejecting quote, unquote, “modern feminism,” and pushing modern femininity instead, and maybe in some ways the most explicit part of what they're doing is they also push an app that was founded by the editor in chief and cofounders of Evie. The app is called 28. It was founded, in part by Peter Thiel, and in the app users log information about their periods to calculate their menstrual cycle, and advertisements for it quite literally run next to articles that criticize hormonal birth control. One of the cofounders and editor in chief, Brittany Hugoboom actually told The New York Times that when she originally pitched Peter Thiel on funding this, part of her pitch was about the, quote, unquote, “fertility crisis.” Which is, as we know, is something that a lot of conservatives are really, really concerned about, for whatever reason.
Zoë Schiffer: I feel like it seems from the outside there's a bit of a contradiction, and I'm wondering if it felt like this at the event, between people like Brett Cooper and Brittany, this cofounder, who are modern entrepreneurial women who seem like they're working really hard and building kind of a business. And then this message that women should take the more traditional female role in the family, and perhaps not be at work. I mean, I don't know what else you mean by being anti-feminist, but do those things feel like they clash? They seem like they do.
Leah Feiger: They absolutely feel like they clash, but the explanation of that from women I spoke to at the event, or even in the articles that they're running on their website, is in fact, no, it's about choice, and it's about women's right to choose if they would like to be at home with their children or they would like to be out in events. And something that caught my eye, honestly, in the last few days that I haven't been able to look away from, is other outlets have put out their descriptions of the party as well. And very little of their descriptions, I'm thinking of this Wall Street Journal article in particular, talked very much about politics. The bigger focus was on Evie being in this conservative space, but this glamorous, glamorous event, and it really sanitized everything, and that is so much of this to me, is that Evie already, through their articles, is sanitizing all of their stances here, and the party was doing the exact same. It was really, really wild to watch.
Brian Barrett: And yeah, and to your point, it's not just about Evie. There is such a huge ecosystem of influencers in this space that have huge followings, that are pushing a very similar line.
Leah Feiger: We're in a moment right now, I think, where media is still figuring out how we talk about political influencers. Do we glamorize, do we sanitize? Do we give them the platform? Do we give them the pedestal? Evie has created its own ecosystem for this, somewhat in the same way that the Republican Manosphere did as well. When it comes to the midterms, we're looking at an entire range of young women voters who perhaps are not that interested in what the Republican mainstream is offering them, but can look at Evie and can look at influencers like Brett Cooper and buy what they're selling. I am very, very, very curious to see how this plays out in the elections this year.
Zoë Schiffer: It is time for our WIRED/TIRED segment. Whatever is new and cool is WIRED, obviously. Whatever is passé is TIRED. Are we ready?
Brian Barrett: I'm going to be ripped from the headlines. This might be a controversial pick. I think my WIRED this week is Lego’s Smart Brick. I don't know if you guys have been following this, but Lego has introduced a brick that has all kinds of sensors in it, an accelerometer. It can basically, you integrate it into an existing system and it can, say, if you're playing with your Millennium Falcon build, it'll know if you have a crash landing, it'll make some sort of noise. It sort of brings a level of interactivity to Lego, which I think purists are probably saying, "No, don't do that. Lego’s fine." And that's true for you. If you don't want to use it, you don't have to, but I think it is nice to see that they're still trying new things. Whether it works or it doesn't, I appreciate the effort and I'm curious to try it out for myself.
Zoë Schiffer: I like that. We're still in the Magna-Tiles phase, but I'm excited for that. Once we can get over the tiny choking hazard, then I feel like we'll launch into the Lego phase.
Brian Barrett: Unstoppable. Yeah, no, they're great.
Leah Feiger: OK. For anyone that actually knows me, this is a very, very difficult one. For me what is TIRED is Resy, and OpenTable, and any app I need to use to get a reservation for anything, ever. I have become a caricature of myself, you guys. I am setting alarms seven times a day to try and get different reservations. I love food. I love going out to eat. And in New York it has just become hell on earth.
Zoë Schiffer: This is going to be Leah's entrance into AI agents, once she figures out how to deploy Clawdbots.
Brian Barrett: Just vibe-code an agent. Vibe-code an agent.
Leah Feiger: Already tried, already tried, already asked a friend of mine. I'm honestly not even kidding. This is something that I have absolutely looked into. This would solve so many things for me, and I'm devastated because, as Zoë in particular knows, I love reservations. I actually love having a plan and knowing that I'm going to be able to get in. So when I say that my WIRED is walking into a restaurant, that's not actually true. Because I would have so much anxiety in the two-hour lead up. I'm like, “Maybe we just won't eat tonight and that's fine. That's fine. I'll be OK with that.” No, my WIRED doesn't in fact exist yet, which is just like a restaurant that entirely refuses reservations, or has a different system altogether. There's a restaurant in Maine that's absolutely amazing, called The Lost Kitchen. They had a whole TV show about them. I mean Aaron French, unbelievable chef. This is how they take reservations, you guys. You mail in a postcard. I thought that was a gimmick before, but now I think that's it. I think that's where I'm at. It's too much. They appified my favorite hobby, and now I can't do it anymore.
Zoë Schiffer: I'm sorry.
Leah Feiger: It's OK. I say this though, and I for sure have an alarm going off in 15 minutes to try and get in somewhere, but will it work?
Zoë Schiffer: I was going to say, I completely still rely on you when I'm in New York. I'm like, I expect every evening to be a cool culinary experience.
Leah Feiger: Oh yes, and it will be. It will be. Trust me. I think it's just a phase. Talk to me in a week or so. I'm annoyed. I'm just annoyed.
Brian Barrett: After you've vibe-coded your AI agent to make reservations.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, exactly.
Leah Feiger: Yeah. This is my path to the dark side.
Zoë Schiffer: This is AGI, baby.
Leah Feiger: What's yours?
Zoë Schiffer: OK, this is my TIRED. I don't want to get in trouble with every member of my family, but my kids have discovered how to FaceTime with their grandparents. My older daughter now spends a lot … she's constantly asking to call my dad in particular. It's very cute, but do I love the fact that she now fully knows how to work an iPhone? I do not. I do not love that. We are on the wait list for the Tin Can phone, and guys, that's my WIRED. I'm really excited for this future. A Wi-Fi-connected phone that just makes calls.
Leah Feiger: What?
Zoë Schiffer: Yes, the marketing is made in a lab to get me to spend money. I love it so much, and supposedly it ships in April.
Leah Feiger: I'm looking it up right now. The colors are so cute. This actually looks like a Tin Can phone. This is not like a Motorola Razr. This is adorable.
Brian Barrett: It's huge.
Zoë Schiffer: No, it's big.
Brian Barrett: And once you get your parent network on it, all the kids in the school can call each other in a nice controlled way.
Zoë Schiffer: Wait, Brian, do your kids have it?
Brian Barrett: I think my kids are a little older, so everyone's already on smartwatches and stuff, so we just missed it. But also check WIRED.com in a couple of weeks, a week, for a really nice story about this.
Leah Feiger: Wait, this is really … I want one. Should we get them and call each other?
Zoë Schiffer: I know we should—
Leah Feiger: Are they encrypted?
Zoë Schiffer: Probably not.
Leah Feiger: That's our show for today. We'll link to all the stories we spoke about today 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. Mark Leyda was our San Francisco studio engineer. Pran Bandi is our New York studio engineer. Kate Osborn is our executive producer, and Katie Drummond is WIRED's global editorial director.