'Uncanny Valley': Minneapolis Misinformation, TikTok's New Owners, and Moltbot Hype

In today’s episode, hosts Brian Barrett and Zoë Schiffer are joined by Tim Marchman, WIRED’s director of science, policy and security, to discuss the week’s news, including how far-right influencers are spreading misinformation in Minneapolis and why the U.S. version of TikTok is off to a rocky start. Plus, we explain why some people are currently obsessed with the AI assistant Moltbot.

Articles mentioned in this episode:

You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrettZoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschifferand Tim Marchman on Bluesky at @timmarchman. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.

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Transcription

Note: This is an automated transcription and may contain errors.

Brian Barrett: How is everyone?

The Marchman team: I’m doing very well.

Zoe Schiffer: Wow.

Brian Barrett: It’s something.

Zoe Schiffer: Shocking, I would say.

Brian Barrett: Yeah. Tim, what’s your secret?

The Marchman team: I try and do a very good job of keeping in mind that my anxious perceptions do not reflect reality and must be considered logically.

Brian Barrett: It’s a better coping mechanism than mine, which is to say my kids have discovered Mario Kartso I play a lot Mario Kart. Zoe?

Zoe Schiffer: I’m doing well. I would say I think I’ve hit a mental and emotional wall with what’s going on, and I’m really grateful to be doing the work that we’re doing because if I was trying to pretend that my corporate job mattered like I was at the start of the first Trump presidency when I was working in tech, I’m so happy I’m not going back. It was a difficult time.

Brian Barrett: But Zoë, is there anything you’re looking forward to, say, in a day or two?

Zoe Schiffer: ALL RIGHT. Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Showing how balanced I am, I’m going to attend the premiere of Melania Trump’s movie.

Brian Barrett: Yes.

Zoe Schiffer: The movie that Amazon Studios invested millions and millions and millions of dollars into the trailer for. I thought-

The Marchman team: I’ve never been so jealous.

Zoe Schiffer: I know. I know. Exceptional work. They made it so dramatic. This woman, as far as I know, sorry to say, has no discernible personality, but they tried everything to cover that up.

Brian Barrett: Tim, in all honesty, I think it’s a safe bet that you could still get a ticket.

Zoe Schiffer: Yeah. Oh yes.

The Marchman team: I’ve been looking for tickets in the Philadelphia area and it looks like I have my pick. The unfortunate thing is that in the city itself this doesn’t seem to be seen, and so I would have to go to a large suburban shopping center. I just don’t think I can commit to that. So I’ll have to wait to watch it on the big screen here at home with a big bucket of popcorn and some sarsaparilla.

Zoe Schiffer: I can’t wait. I’ll be there.

Brian Barrett: You know what? I will too.

Zoe Schiffer: Welcome to WIRED Uncanny Valley. I’m Zoë Schiffer, WIRED’s director of business and industry.

Brian Barrett: My name is Brian Barrett, editor-in-chief.

The Marchman team: And I’m Tim Marchman, director of science, policy and security. I will be replacing Leah Feiger this week.

Let’s start by discussing the news that caught our attention this week: ICE activity as it unfolds in Minnesota.

This past weekend, tens of thousands of Minnesotans took to the streets to peacefully protest increased activity by federal immigration agents in the state and to document their activities, including the fatal shooting of Minneapolis resident Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent and the arrest of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos. Things escalated when federal agents shot and killed another person, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse who was participating in the protests. The Trump administration announced in recent days that it was firing Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol official who was billed as a commanding general. It’s out of Minnesota and border czar Tom Homan will take over operations in the state, but things haven’t exactly calmed down on the ground. And last night:

Representative Ilhan Omar, archival audio clip: ICE could not be reformed. He cannot be rehabilitated. We must abolish ICE for good.

The Marchman team: Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar was sprayed with an unknown substance while speaking with constituents at a town hall meeting.

Representative Ilhan Omar, archival audio clip: And DHS Secretary Kristi Noem must resign or face impeachment.

Several speakers, archive audio clip: Wow, Wow. What is this? What is this? What did he spray?

Representative Ilhan Omar, archival audio clip: I don’t know.

Several speakers, archive audio clip: Oh my God. Oh my God.

The Marchman team: So it’s really scary, and this particular incident brings an important element to that, which is the role of far-right influencers. The theoretical pretext for the presence of immigration agents in the state is that the Trump administration has decided to strengthen the state’s response to a fraud crisis in its Medicaid program. This crisis is real, but the claims that brought it to the administration’s attention were not. A right-wing influencer named Nick Shirley played a particular role here with a highly influential YouTube video claiming, without evidence, that daycares run by Somali residents in Minneapolis had embezzled millions of dollars, and now we’re seeing violence against a member of Congress and, of course, a Somali American by someone who, based on his online profile, appears to have been very influenced by such claims. What do you think of the role of the far right in this country?

Brian Barrett: Tim, you go even further. It’s not just that he… So he was apparently inspired by all of these claims, but also as soon as this happened, there was an attempt in some right-wing influencer spheres to spin even the attack on Ilhan Omar as a set-up. This became its own conspiracy vortex where they said, “Look, you can see her giving him the signal to stage the attack.” And even President Trump, speaking on the phone to ABC News shortly after it happened, said, “She probably staged it herself, knowing her.” It’s just that we’re kind of stuck in this vortex that we can’t get out of every time something happens. And we’ve seen it repeatedly throughout the ICE occupation of Minneapolis and Minnesota, every time something happens, there’s this immediate attempt to distort, to defame, to slander, that has no basis in reality. It’s just kind of a playbook for now. We’re just playing the playbook. And by all of us, I mean far-right influencers who do nothing. Can I say scoundrels? Zoë, what do you think of scoundrels?

Zoe Schiffer: You live in Alabama. I feel like you should definitely say it’s not going well.

Brian Barrett: Is he a scoundrel from Alabama? Is it from the South?

Zoe Schiffer: It looks sort of old school in an appealing way. I mean, I was really struck by the kind of instant smear campaign against Alex Pretti. I mean, I think what you both say is correct. It really feels like our shared truth has completely degraded, and there’s an opportunity for people to try to twist what’s happening in very wild ways. But just talking about the nurse who was shot and killed, at first they, the right-wing influencers and others, are blatantly lying and saying he was trying to assassinate an ICE official who acted in self-defense. Then they go back and say maybe he was in the country illegally? And now it feels like they’re like, “OK, he was a normal guy, but it was really irresponsible to carry a gun to this protest.” I mean, it’s been fascinating and horrifying to watch this play in real time.

Brian Barrett: And that’s where you see where this ends up, Second Amendment rights, which is obviously a big part of the conservative platform. In fact, you start to see some reluctance. I think this is one of the first moments where the administration needs to reverse course to this extent with Trump 2.0. I’m not sure this takes us anywhere in the long run, but it’s interesting to see that they’ve apparently found some limits that they’re running up against in terms of what they can say and how far they can spin things.

The Marchman team: I think this is important, because the operational theory of Donald Trump and his advisor Stephen Miller is that you never concede, you never back down, that admitting weakness is inviting attack. And there’s something there. So when you have… And when we’re talking about far-right influencers here, we’re not just talking about random people. We’re talking about people at the highest levels of the administration who, as soon as this news comes out, are calling Pretti a terrorist, a murderer, seeing things that have been easily refuted. They’ve been forced to backtrack on this, and there’s a war of flight going on between factions within the administration, with people pointing fingers at each other. This is a somewhat new development. The White House did not want to say it was wrong, nor did it want to go back.

And I think they’re right to say that ceding the power of public opinion, ceding the power of the people they listen to, whether they’re influential writers, Republican elected officials, as well as the general public, it shows that they can’t impose their will on reality without having to surrender account of reality. And that’s something that I think people can be optimistic about or maybe a little less pessimistic about.

Speaking of flip-flopping, let’s take a look at what Silicon Valley executives were saying and doing about it. So on Saturday, hours after federal agents killed Pretti, a group of CEOs chose to spend Saturday evening at a private White House screening of the Amazon MGM Studios-produced documentary Melania about the First Lady. They included Apple’s Tim Cook, Amazon’s Andy Jassy and AMD’s Lisa Su. We also had other news that Brett Ratner, the director of the project, who is somewhat notorious for many reasons among which he is not a gem to work for, was not a gem to work for in this production.

Why did you hear about this, Zoë?

Zoe Schiffer: I mean, so this is one of those moments where I feel like the lightness and seriousness of the situation is really evident. The same day Alex Pretti is shot, we hear this news that these CEOs are apparently gathering at the White House. And I think Brian and I were both like, “Tim Cook is probably going to say there were some weather problems and his plane couldn’t make it.” But actually, we go through social media and we find pictures of him there. There are photos of Lisa Su there. They were therefore very present at the screening.

I really felt like that moment was pretty fascinating Because this has been going on basically since 2018, George Floyd protesting that we’ve really seen a lot of activism from tech workers in Silicon Valley. There have been bits and pieces that have appeared, but for the most part, I feel like Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter marked this moment where people became pretty quiet after that and were less willing to speak out and speak out. I think people were really nervous about their jobs. The job market was weak. We’re in a period now where many of those same concerns are still present, but I feel like people I’ve talked to who work at Apple and other companies are saying, “That was a real turning point. It was so overwhelming.” And they were even sending messages internally to their leaders saying, “This is completely unacceptable. Why were you there? It took Tim Cook a few days, Brian, if I’m not mistaken?

Brian Barrett: A little time. Yeah, a little while.

Zoe Schiffer: Yeah, some time to write an internal statement. And the statement was pretty lukewarm to say the least, but he said, “It’s a really trying time.” And essentially, he tried to misrepresent his presence at the White House by saying that he took the opportunity to speak to President Trump about his views, I mean, apparently implying that he spoke to him about immigration.

Brian Barrett: And we can go back and look. I think he even said, “I talked to President Trump this week. » I think he even dodged the idea. I don’t think he spoke to her in person. I think he just gave her a follow-up call later after he had time to think or something. This is all quite ridiculous.

Zoe Schiffer: Yeah. I mean, I hate to speculate, but I’m just going to say right now, I find this extremely hard to believe, Tim Cook is primarily known as being a diplomat and using his position to promote Apple and its interests. I don’t think many of these CEOs see it as being in their or their company’s best interests to confront President Trump in any meaningful way. But we’ve seen rank-and-file employees take advantage of this moment to speak up, post on X and say, “This is not OK.”

We also got a scoop this week from Maxwell Zeff, one of our big AI journalists here at WIRED, who was talking about Google DeepMind employees saying that a federal agent showed up at Google’s Cambridge office in the fall, and that they were saying to their executives, “What are you doing to keep us safe?” I think it’s easy to look at a statement like that and roll your eyes and say that these well-paid tech workers are focused on this moment. At the same time, Silicon Valley is made up of a workforce made up largely of immigrants, highly skilled workers from foreign countries. And I think people have legitimate concerns about their own safety, this feeling that maybe your wealth and your power, your job isn’t necessarily going to keep you safe right now.

Brian Barrett: I mean, to put this in even more perspective, another scoop we got this week from Makena Kelly was about Palantir. Palantir, which works closely with the government across the board, signed a $30 million contract with DHS and ICE to build a platform literally called Immigration OS, whose sole purpose is to collect data for deportations. Even Palantir employees are asking in their public Slack: “What can we do to stop this, to end this?” “And the fact that we’re in a world where Palantir employees are way ahead of, say, Tim Cook or these other CEOs is disconcerting. We are really in a somewhat upside down situation. And I think in particular the leadership at Palantir has said, “Well, no, this is what we’re doing,” and they’re going to continue to do what they’re doing. And Apple too, and all these other companies. I think until this translates into something actionable, it’s just PR.

The Marchman team: So a question I have for both of you is: Do you think these leaders understand the issues here? Because one of the things that really stood out to me about the discussions that Palantir workers were having in this public Slack was people asking about the long-term consequences. Does Palantir not foresee the possibility of a future Democratic administration that could cancel its contracts, or the consequences of public pushback? And pretty universally, among these tech barons, they seem to act like there won’t be a moment after this one. And that’s something I really struggle to understand.

Zoe Schiffer: Yes, I would say that the Russian oligarchs have a different view of how this played out. When you bend the knee and say that you will absolutely fall in line, you put yourself in a sort of precarious position, where as soon as you stray from the party line, swift action will be taken against you, and certainly your money will not protect you. But I think that’s kind of, I hate to say this, but the genius of what Trump is doing, because I think when you ask people, over and over again, to move their moral line closer and closer to his line, then they’re kind of like, “Well, we’ve already been to the inauguration.” We’ve already praised Trump in X, Y, Z ways. We’ve already done all of that to position our company to win right now. And so it feels a little bit like a sunk cost, like, “Okay, if you turn away at this point, you’ve lost everything you’ve done up to this point.” »

Brian Barrett: I don’t say this to excuse what’s happening, but ultimately they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders.

Zoe Schiffer: Oh, how dare you bring that word into this space.

Brian Barrett: No, sorry, but they do. I’m sorry, but they do it. Good-for-nothings with fiduciary responsibilities. But Donald Trump proved, he showed that he could ruin a company overnight, or he could make the United States demand that they take a big stake in it overnight. It can do so much for these companies in the short term that I understand why they feel the risk and threat. But again, I don’t agree with how they are handling the situation.

Speaking of the major impact of the United States on business, can we make a difference? Can we talk a little about TikTok?

Zoe Schiffer: We need to.

Brian Barrett: Yes. THANKS. GOOD. Not that it’s lighter, but it’s not as heavy. So the American version of TikTok is here, right? We are officially, since last week, January 22, in the brave new world where TikTok belongs to various shareholders based in the United States, but also still of the ByteDance type, and the algorithm is the same. And that’s just a lot for some, for show, and for others, for the benefit of Donald Trump’s friends. But after the launch it was a bit difficult.

Archival audio extract: Alright, TikTok, what’s going on?

Brian Barrett: Some users complained that it felt like content critical of ICE and Donald Trump was being suppressed.

Archival audio extract: TikTok now censors our content a lot more, especially since this switch.

Archival audio extract: My opinions on this app right now are garbage and have been since it was purchased by Larry Ellison.

Archival audio extract: Apparently my face and the news are against community guidelines.

Zoe Schiffer: And it was kind of fascinating because TikTok was having problems in the United States. The app was essentially down for a large number of users, but this problem was interpreted as censorship, an accusation that has plagued TikTok for years and years now. In fact, that’s part of the reason why we are right now, where it has been transferred, where TikTok US has been transferred to American majority owners. So we saw people speculating that the algorithm was changed essentially to please Donald Trump.

The Marchman team: That’s a problem in itself, whether or not people can be convinced that something they say is due to a data center power outage due to the massive storm that hit the United States this week is actually what’s behind it. This seems like a pretty egregious example of the new ownership destroying credibility with a large portion of the user base.

Brian Barrett: We’ve already alluded to the property a bit, but here’s who it is. Oracle owns 15% of the TikTok USDS joint venture. Larry Ellison is the co-founder of Oracle. He is a very close ally of Donald Trump. Larry Ellison’s son David Ellison, CEO of Paramount Skydance, installed Bari Weiss as head of CBS News, with CBS News moving in a more Trump-friendly direction. So the problem is that this is sort of part of this broader media and cultural capture by Donald Trump and adjacent interests. So people are quick to monitor, to look for, hey, any kind of change that seems to reflect that, they’re going to jump on it.

The Marchman team: And it’s a web of interlocking interests. One of the things Paramount, now controlled by Larry Ellison’s son David, did was spend billions and billions and billions of dollars for the exclusive rights to the Ultimate Fighting Championship, which will host a cage match on the May lawn. its Blanche to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary, and is a cultural space where Donald Trump attempted to dominate and reach young men. So it’s entirely reasonable to view them all as a nested series of MAGA-friendly spaces owned by White House associates.

Zoe Schiffer: God willing, that first case will be Elon Musk versus Mark Zuckerberg, because we’ve been waiting for this for years.

Brian Barrett: We are owed. This is what we owe.

The Marchman team: I pray.

Brian Barrett: I was told this was going to happen years ago.

Zoe Schiffer: I know. I was ready. I was ready. So the other reason why this trust issue is, in my opinion, a potential problem for TikTok is that the app is changing its terms of service and actually asking for more permissions from US users. So one thing it’s specifically asking for, WIRED reported this week, is to add more granular location tracking. So, previously the app did not collect precise GPS-derived location on US users, but now if you give permission to the app, that’s exactly what it will do. Basically, it wants to know where exactly you are, probably for advertising purposes, but that’s something that requires a fair amount of trust between users and the company, which TikTok seems to be lacking at the moment especially.

Brian Barrett: And also the kind of thing that people easily click on without realizing it’s happening, right? TikTok now also tracks data. Anything you put into any of its AI tools, if you put in a prompt or any type of information that you give it, it will track that data and use it.

Again, all of this is ultimately used to serve you ads, but that’s the premise, and it’s the kind of lack of opacity, lack of clarity, just sort of, oh, all of a sudden this happens. And I think it’s legitimate to closely monitor, even if it hasn’t happened yet, how TikTok’s algorithm changes in more subtle ways.

I don’t think if there were to be some sort of manipulation of TikTok, I don’t think it would be as brutal as not posting on ICE. I think you can see things changing in terms of what people encounter in their feeds and what gets promoted or not, because that fits into the black box. It’s something that you can’t quantify from the outside, but it can somehow have an effect on user sentiment, which by the way is exactly the thing that they were trying to get around when they started this process in the first place to take TikTok out of Chinese ownership.

The Marchman team: Another problem here is simply that this is an infamously difficult thing to keep up with with TikTok in particular. A few years ago, when researchers had API level access to X, for example, they were able to do a lot of really impressive sentiment analysis and just track how things worked. Without this type of access to X now, this work is difficult, if not impossible. And TikTok is much more slippery because it’s such a personalized algorithm. So it’s one thing to just be a What we’re aware of is that we may not be able to track, with much confidence, changes to what it serves to users, even though we are, anecdotally, pretty sure that it’s changing. So it’s not a fun thing to think about.

Zoe Schiffer: Now that we’re talking about apps, I’m going to head over to our lightest segment yet.

Brian Barrett: I like the way we are progressing.

Zoe Schiffer: Yes.

Brian Barrett: We relax a little as we go along.

Zoe Schiffer: Exactly. I think this one is really fun.

The Marchman team: We will leave here in a good mood.

Zoe Schiffer: Yes. Have you heard of ClawdBot, now known as MoltBot?

Brian Barrett: That’s true, but I desperately need you to explain to me why I should or shouldn’t buy a Mac Mini, put it on and use it.

The Marchman team: Even. It’s in my peripheral vision, but I’ll learn as I go.

Zoe Schiffer: I think Tim will have to explain the immense security risks associated with letting this app run your life. But basically the magic of this app, as I understand it from Will Knight’s excellent reporting at WIRED.com, is that it’s essentially an AI assistant that connects many different applications on your computer. It works locally and, best of all, you can talk to it through a messaging app. So send him commands, and then he will figure out how to run and manage your life for you. The caveat, as with all AI assistants, is that when you hear, “Wow, the AI assistant is going to run your life.” At least for me, I’m like, “Can he submit an expense report?” Because I would give him any amount of information to make that happen.

But even though there are specific circumstances where people use it to perform very complex tasks like that, most of the time they use it to schedule meetings, send a note, or almost to manage their daily calendar. And it’s a lot of work. This is quite a complex setup for this level of support.

Brian Barrett: It’s so interesting that this seems to me to be the real revolutionary AI agent because it doesn’t come from Google, OpenAI or Anthropic. This comes from a guy named Peter who just built-

Zoe Schiffer: Pierre Steinberger.

Brian Barrett: Yeah, Peter Steinberger built it himself, he just wanted to know if he could make something work, not even like… He was playing with voice memo stuff, I think. And then, all of a sudden, I realized, “Wait, I created the most useful AI agent yet.” » ?

Zoe Schiffer: Yeah. I mean, it’s pretty fascinating because we go to talk to him and he said, yeah, basically, he sent a voice memo to the app, and this robot was able to turn the voice memo into a text file using a pretty complex process and then interpret the information and do what he wanted it to do, which is pretty amazing.

I think it’s really interesting because I think there’s this feeling that the company that wins or the set of companies that win at that point in time will be the one that has by far the most sophisticated extended language model. But actually what users want most of the time is a friendly, easy-to-use interface, that thing that can connect many different parts and just be a normal person working on your behalf in the background. And so I think it’ll be interesting to see the application layer built on top of these really sophisticated LLMs take off, I think, over the next year.

Brian Barrett: Yeah, because what you said, like you said, it’s hard to set up, but using it, you just text and say, “Hey, can you handle this bill?” We’ll be talking to a guy who’s trying to use MoltBot to run his entire small business, process invoices, and interact with customers. So it’s like the front end is hard, but from there you have a little buddy working in the background and typing for you.

Zoe Schiffer: Yeah. Will was sort of being plundered by MoltBot at the end of this report. He would send me a message like, “Do you think Condé Nast would let me organize this for everyone?” And I was like, “No, in no world.”

Brian Barrett: No, I don’t think so.

Zoe Schiffer: Which leads me to say that he spoke to a person who gave it. I believe his credit card information or Amazon account login information allowed him to purchase products in his name. Tim, I think we’re getting to the segment where you can tell us…

Brian Barrett: “This is a very bad idea.”

Zoe Schiffer: “That’s a bad idea.”

The Marchman team: I don’t think you need to get too technical here to understand why this is a bad idea. If you just step back, one piece of advice people who think very seriously about security will give you is to not panic about the capabilities of a program or the vulnerabilities you might introduce into your life by using something, but to simply ask yourself to model the threat. What is the worst scenario that could happen if this goes wrong?

So if you’re dealing with something with fairly low stakes, it might not be a big deal. And if you mean conceptually: “What’s the worst thing that could happen here if I use this to automate my comic poll lists?” He won’t have access to my email, he won’t have access to my bank accounts, he won’t have access to sensitive professional information. I just want to make ordering comics a little easier, this could be really good, because worst case scenario, you order too many comics or not enough, and you say to the guy at the comic book store, “My robot screwed up.” Let’s sort this out. I didn’t actually order 500 copies of Batman.

If you are dealing with medical or financial information, you should assume that you are posting it to the public Internet. This won’t necessarily happen. This is unlikely to happen, but this is what you need to prepare for. And that’s what I can’t figure out is how to allow something that can even access the Internet to do these really sensitive tasks. There will be a lot of engineers thinking of very clever solutions to this problem, but it’s just a fundamental thing that I have a problem with, and I encourage people to be very careful when they’re playing with these things, and certainly not to give them direct access to something that they wouldn’t want their mother to be able to see.

Brian Barrett: Yeah. Your mother doesn’t want to know how many Batman comics you buy, Tim. The only thing with these is that their usefulness is proportional to the amount of information you provide them. And so that’s a pretty dangerous thing where you’re like, “Oh, actually, this is really good for managing my calendar.” I wonder what else it can do. All these other things involve increasing your exposure. And even though MoltBot runs locally on your own little computer, it doesn’t have to. You can run it in the cloud. Some people want to, but I don’t know if they are necessarily aware of the risks you just talked about or if they care about them.

Zoe Schiffer: I also think this is a good time to address the intellectual property angle. You may be wondering why did ClawdBot change its very cute name to MoltBot? And that’s a great question. Apparently, that’s because Anthropic, which makes many products named Claude, said, “No, no, no, this is not OK. This person and this app are not associated with our company.” And so he chose Moltbot because I think Lobster’s Molt?

Brian Barrett: Yeah, it’s very poetic because it was the CLAWD bot. So molting is the shedding of the shell, I think? It therefore loses the name ClawdBot.

Zoe Schiffer: Beautiful.

Brian Barrett: …to become Moltbot.

Zoe Schiffer: Although he hinted to Will that he planned to change it, or even go back to something else in the future. So stay tuned.

Brian Barrett: I also want to say that this may seem far away to many people. The idea is that I’m probably not going to buy a Mac Mini and install Moltbot tomorrow, but I use Google Chrome, and there’s more AI agent news there. Google announced an automatic navigation feature in Chrome on Wednesday. This is the case if you have a paid AI plan with Google, but it’s kind of similar in that Google offers you an AI agent who will browse the web for you, shop for you, book flights for you. It’s much more common and built into the most popular browser in the world by far and will be, I think, a lot of people’s first introduction to AI agents, especially if and as they move it out of these paid tiers and make it available to everyone, which you can definitely see them doing. They have done this with other AI products in the past.

The Marchman team: I just hope that people are segmenting things here, and that for example, if you want to play with this and give him access to your credit card information, you give him a card that won’t prevent you from being able to pay your mortgage if it were gutted by a malware injection. Use common sense here.

Zoe Schiffer: Well, now you heard it here for the first time, unlike the President of the United States and apparently Elon Musk, Tim Marchman is in favor of data silos, if you remember that executive order.

Brian Barrett: Look at this.

Zoe Schiffer: I think WIRED.com is mostly pro data silos.

Brian Barrett: Yeah. We like a data silo.

Zoe Schiffer: After the break, we’ll share our WIRED/TIRED picks for the week. Stay with us.

It’s time for the WIRED/TIRED segment. Anything new and cool is WIRED, anything outdated we call TIRED. Are we ready, Brian and Tim?

Brian Barrett: I’m ready.

The Marchman team: I’m ready.

Zoe Schiffer: Tim, I’m going to say you start. Yeah.

The Marchman team: My thing with WIRED is nonviolent resistance. I think in some quarters there has been a lot of impatience with the idea that passively resisting violence is efficient and effective. It’s effective. That works. It’s not weak. It is the most powerful tool you have. This is the message of many world religions and social movements over the centuries. And I think what we see in Minnesota, the discipline, the concern for others, the willingness to put yourself physically between the state and those it attacks, speaks to its power. And the fact that this has concrete effects on the personal and, to a certain extent, on the policy, shows that what is old is new here.

Zoe Schiffer: I love it. Brian, I hope yours is somewhere between mine and Tim’s because I can’t describe how far apart my WIRED and my TIRED are this week, even though I completely agree with what Tim just said.

Brian Barrett: No, mine takes a different approach. It’s on another scale. My TIRED is the doomsday clock. I hate to say it. The doomsday clock tells you how close we are to midnight. Midnight is the End of the World, published annually by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. This week they announced that we are now 85 seconds before midnight. We have never been this close to midnight. I appreciate what the doomsday clock is trying to do, but I feel like at a certain point, whether it’s 85 or 88 seconds before midnight, I know things are going bad. And I don’t know if quantifying it that way helps me process it better. So I’m fed up with the Doomsday Clock.

WIRED: quantum logic clocks. It is a little older, but it is the most precise clock in the world down to the 19th decimal place, created by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technologies. It’s great, it’s accurate, and it lets you say the phrase “quantum logic clock” in casual conversation. I’m going to say it’s WIRED.

Zoe Schiffer: ALL RIGHT. Well, I wish I could think of something a little more noble, but I’m TIRED for me it’s the baby iPads – no stone unturned for anyone who has to give their child a screen for any reason. I support you. I see you, I follow you frequently. However, Boone, one of our dear colleagues here at WIRED.com gave me an AI-powered robot, I think it’s a hamster. It’s called Moflin. Have you heard of this?

Brian Barrett: I didn’t do it.

Zoe Schiffer: I gave it to Ava, my four-year-old daughter, this weekend, and she has never loved anything more than this hamster. It makes little noises. I have no idea how the AI is involved or if it is involved at all. He wakes up and sort of moves.

Brian Barrett: When you talk about AI-powered hamster…

Zoe Schiffer: I think it’s a marketing term, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that. But supposedly when you interact with it, it learns your signals and interacts accordingly. Literally all he can do is make little squeaks and roll around on the floor. No other action is associated with it, but she is completely obsessed with it. Boone named him Puff, so Ava named him Puff too, and now he lives at our house, and she takes him naps in his plugged in bed because he needs to be plugged in every once in a while. And I don’t know. It’s very delicious.

Brian Barrett: God, I would kill for a bed plug.

Zoë Schiffer: I know. I know. It is the most expensive item she owns.

Brian Barrett: Wow. Well, it’s all that AI.

Zoe Schiffer: Yes, exactly. It’s this big language model that’s running in the background.

Brian Barrett: That’s our show for today. We’ll link up all the stories we talked about today in the show notes. Adriana Tapia produced this episode, Macro Sound’s Amar Lal mixed this episode, Matt Giles and Daniel Roman fact-checked this episode, Mark Leyda was our studio engineer in San Francisco, Kate Osborn is our executive producer, and Katie Drummond is WIRED’s global editorial director.