The team is back this week to discuss how America’s biggest tech companies increasingly find themselves targets in the ongoing war against Iran. They also provide insight into how DC’s Polymarket pop-up bar went off the rails. Plus, our hosts review the steps the Trump administration is taking to control the upcoming midterm elections.
Articles mentioned in this episode:
- Iran threatens to start attacking major US tech companies on April 1
- Polymarket’s Washington coming-out party was a disaster
- This is how Trump is already threatening the midterm elections
You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrettZoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschifferand Leah Feiger on Bluesky at @leahfeiger. Write to us at [emailprotected].
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Transcription
Note: This is an automated transcription and 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, leave us a comment in the podcast or app of your choice. This really helps us reach more people, and for any questions or comments you can always reach us at [emailprotected]. Thanks for listening. Time for the show.
Zoe Schiffer: Leah, have you made it to Chicago?
Léa Feiger: Honestly, barely. I’ve spent more time in airports over the past three days than I care to admit.
Brian Barrett: You told me yesterday that you were excited to be moving from Newark instead of the other one – that’s the first time I’ve heard that.
Léa Feiger: I was young when I said that.
Zoe Schiffer: Welcome to WIRED Uncanny Valley. My name is Zoë Schiffer, Director of Business and Industry.
Brian Barrett: My name is Brian Barrett, editor-in-chief.
Léa Feiger: And I’m Leah Feiger, senior political editor.
Zoe Schiffer: This week on the show we have a pretty comprehensive episode for you all. A bit of international politics like Iran threatens to target US tech companies. There’s also election news as we follow Trump’s attempts to control the midterm electionsand a scene report from our colleague from DC who had the great mission of hitting the Polymarket pop-up barwhich was a bit of a Guys Party Situation.
Brian Barrett: Showing you behind the scenes of the magic of Uncanny Valley podcast, we’re recording this on a Wednesday. It will be released on Thursday. That’s the magic. So, things could happen between now and then, but this Wednesday, yesterday, Tuesday, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned that it plans to begin attacking more than a dozen American businesses across the Middle East. If more Iranian leaders were killed in the ongoing war, they had already made that threat, but what was different was that they had set a deadline. They said that on April 1 we were going to start targeting businesses in these areas. There are 18 companies in total in this field. They actually gave a list. On this list are Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta, IBM, Tesla, Palantir and many others. So far this has only happened in an attack that we can talk about later that somehow affects Amazon Web Services. But it appears to be another one of those escalations. And I’m really curious about what’s going on with these companies, what obligations they have to their employees to protect them, what that means for all kinds of investments in this region, which is increasingly important. It feels like this opens up a lot of serious questions. It doesn’t matter whether these attacks succeed or not, hopefully, but this is definitely a time of escalation.
Léa Feiger: I was quite struck by parts of this where, you know, calling on employees of these tech companies in the area to distance themselves from their workplaces, and residents living near the offices of these companies to move away to a safe place, that’s a very serious warning. And it reminds me a lot that what’s happening here, this war that is becoming a war with a capital W, is not the wars of Trump’s childhood. We are in a globalized world where it will not be possible to escape the blowback if American companies are actually attacked. It’s very different from the military. It’s an impact that I think would be very difficult to escape, beyond the fact that it’s horrible, it’s sad. It’s people’s lives.
Zoe Schiffer: Yeah. I mean, we contacted every company on the list. It turns out they don’t really want to comment on their feelings about it or what they’re doing. I was actually quite surprised. I was like, I don’t know, are you on a hit list and you don’t want to say anything?
Léa Feiger: No, they don’t want to share their plans. They don’t want to say if they left their employees. No, but they don’t even want to say whether they take it seriously, because if they take it seriously, they don’t believe that the American government and its military will be able to handle the situation. It’s a lose-lose situation. On the one hand, Trump posts about how the United States is winning, and if it doesn’t, they will bring hail. You have to at least pretend if you’re the head of these companies that you believe that? While of course putting thousands of your employees at risk.
Brian Barrett: And the United States said that after that last thing, someone made a comment that was basically like, “Well, we’ll respond if they do something here,” which is a bit like, “We’ll definitely put up a stop sign after someone gets run over.” I have already alluded to this. Iran is ready to do this. They have already suffered two strikes on Amazon Web Services data centers last month and damaged another. This is somehow the first publicly confirmed attack against US-owned hyperscale cloud infrastructure. And I guess my question is, to what extent do we think of the goals as sort of a symbolic headquarters, even though they’re empty relative to actual critical infrastructure or actual infrastructure, powering the cloud, the manufacturing facilities, whatever, oddly enough, what shaped these goals. Take it back, I hope this is just bluster and it continues.
Zoe Schiffer: I mean, but this follows Sam Altman’s trip to the Middle East with members of the Trump administration where he was there to make deals and probably set up what will become large-scale data centers. So, he and other AI executives see this region as a really lucrative place to start doing business or expand their operations. And I think that’s something that, for example, Dario Amodei said, “Hey, we should be wary of putting data centers in the Middle East.” And I think they take it seriously. It’s been interesting though. I will say that I reached out to people at Anthropic and sources at OpenAI to ask, “What do you think about the war in Iran?” What is worrying you right now? By and large, people who work at these companies in San Francisco are asking, “What war?” They just focus on what’s going on here at home and don’t seem to pay much attention to it. I don’t think that’s true for the leaders, but the rank and file shrug their shoulders.
Brian Barrett: This surprises me a little, because all of this results in a sharply declining stock market, including technology companies that have been really, really hit by 20 percent in some cases. Nvidia is really quite far away, Meta – so, I’m a little surprised in that I feel like the IPO climate is going to be less hospitable for a lot of these companies that are looking for that for their exit. And many people who have invested in their companies have options on these companies, and are seeing their value decrease day by day. So it’s a shame that you have to touch your wallet to get people’s attention, but probably at some point.
Zoe Schiffer: And I think if the effect on their wallets continues, we’ll see these people really, really care. I’m sure we’ll see discussions about this in Slack, but I think they’re pretty used to the ups and downs. And so, while that’s a pretty dramatic decline for some public companies, particularly because when we talk about, for example, OpenAI, the idea was that they were looking at an IPO towards the end of the year. So I think at least from the people that I’ve talked to, which of course is a handful of the overall employee base, it kind of feels like a lot could change.
Léa Feiger: This week will also be a real indicator. Trump is giving a speech Wednesday night about Iran, but regardless of what Trump says, Iran has indicated that it feels exactly the opposite. Trump says the war will be over in two weeks. Iran says the war is over when it says it is over, when it has won. So we’ve put them up against the wall in a very serious way, and there doesn’t really seem to be any end in sight, especially if these are the types of companies that are on a hit list, that are so close to the heart of the Trump administration.
Brian Barrett: I’ll say one more thing about what you just said, Leah, is that there’s been an incredible trio of quotes over the last couple of days where Trump has said something like, “The negotiations are going very well.” We are making a lot of progress. Iran said: “We haven’t even started negotiations, it won’t happen.” And then Pete Hegseth stepped in and said:
Pete Hegseth, archival audio: We also see ourselves as part of this negotiation. We negotiate with bombs.
Brian Barrett: We will negotiate with bombs. And that really sums up where we are.
Léa Feiger: And of course, the war in Iran will continue to be a point of contention probably until the midterms. We’ve got months to go, but we’re currently in the middle of primary season, which as you know is one of my favorite times of the year because it’s a time when we actually express our political craziness. I love it, but we really need to talk about all the ways the Trump administration is already taking actions that threaten the integrity of elections. David Gilbert, jo Senior political journalist at WIRED, published a very good article on this subject this week. And one of the main things that this report calls attention to is the SAVE America Act. Are you very familiar with this?
Brian Barrett: I’m familiar in the sense that it sounds bad.
Zoe Schiffer: Strong grip.
Léa Feiger: It was a strong hold. That’s why people come Uncanny Valley. It’s for this kind of shots.
Brian Barrett: Okay, how about this? This looks really bad.
Léa Feiger: GOOD. Even better. Yes, that’s what I was looking for. Look, this is basically the Republican answer to the debunked conspiracy theory that millions of immigrants flood polling places every election, voting for Democrats, making life really, really bad for election-stealing Republicans across the country. This law would disenfranchise millions of people because it would require anyone attempting to vote to produce a passport or birth certificate, something many Americans eligible to vote do not have access to. It narrowly passed the House. Democrats are still working to block its passage in the Senate. This comes up often in conversations. I feel like this is something that me and other policy-oriented people were talking about a lot a few weeks ago and everyone was like, “What is this?” But now I With the unfunding of the TSA and partial government shutdowns, et cetera, Trump has made this a focal point of his administration. It’s like, “We need to pass the SAVE Act.” So this is just one of the ways that the Trump administration is putting a lot of pressure on and trying to make sure that results in a very unfair midterm election for everyone. And among that, they’re also working on a bunch of other things, the war on mail-in voting. Historically, Trump hates this, even though he loves mailing in ballots himself.
Brian Barrett: And benefited from mail-in voting, I would say.
Léa Feiger: Oh yeah.
Brian Barrett: I find it odd that Trump seems to think mail-in voting is just a Democrat thing. Many Republican voters use mail-in voting.
Léa Feiger: Yes. And on the contrary, all the pressure against mail-in voting has frankly hurt their results a little bit because all these Republicans are saying, “Oh my God, mail-in voting is rubbish.” And then they don’t vote by mail. It’s very complicated, and this one is very strange, but they kept working on it. Election deniers are currently found across government, recruited because they were reinforcing election conspiracy theories when Trump was out of office. They have continued to do so since their appointment. They are present throughout government, in various agencies. And even if there are possible concerns on the day, the administration has suggested the possibility of sending ICE agents to election sites. So there’s a lot here. And I was really impressed, I think, by some of the comments on wired.com or online about how people were saying, “Oh yeah, that’s horrible.” I knew the Trump administration was doing all these things. I think people were a little shocked by the number of hands in so many different pockets. This is a very comprehensive approach. How to change an entire vision of elections? That’s it. It’s an incredible track record. I have to give it to them.
Brian Barrett: Well, and then it continues, right? It’s something dynamic. On Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order that is sort of part of this war on mail-in voting that we’ve been talking about. This would require states to provide a list of eligible voters to the U.S. government 60 days before the election to have the right to ask the Postal Service to deliver those mail-in ballots. So it’s been a long time. No, no. I think one thing I want to make clear is that elections in the United States are, by nature, structurally, and for good reasons, very, very localized. You have your local elections, and yet there’s a reason the federal government doesn’t control elections the way Trump seems to want by design. For obvious reasons, a central authority with such power over elections could do a lot of harm. Leah, my question to you is: how likely is this to actually happen? The SAVE Act is stalled and the Senate is unwilling to pass it. The decree will probably be rejected by the courts, but who knows? We know what Trump wants to do. And again, it’s really bad, as my analysis showed, but what can it actually do? What is the point of having these measures adopted and what are the mechanisms for this?
Léa Feiger: That’s a very good question. And it’s a little hard to tell right now while we’re in this primary period, which is why this approach, which is just throwing a ton of spaghetti at the wall and seeing which sticks have worked really well for them in the past. So they’re making a lot of very educated guesses about what that would mean for them and what that would mean about the very specific distribution of votes. When you say, for example, register 60 days in advance to vote, the election is in early November, that brings us to early September. This excludes students who register to vote on their college campuses. He is the one we are looking for. So it’s a very specific targeted approach. Plus, I guess to be clear, there’s a very good chance that the Republicans will do very poorly in November. Things aren’t looking good for them from a polling standpoint. And so, to encourage your population to say: “If we lose, it’s because of cheating. » And they say: “They are not going to succeed. » If the war in Iran continues, if we still can’t travel, or if some of us spend eight hours straight in the New York airport…
Brian Barrett: Leah is now a one-issue voter.
Léa Feiger: I’m a one-issue voter, and that’s defunding the TSA and improving the weather. All of this is to say that we’re reaching a time where they’re hedging their bets and saying, “If we lose, we have to figure out who’s to blame.” » And it certainly won’t be Republican voters or Republican strategists.
Brian Barrett: After the break, we’re going to take you to the Polymarket pop-up bar in Washington DC. Stay with us.
So, a few weeks ago, Polymarketwhich is the online prediction market where people bet on the outcomes of real-world events, is incredibly popular (you may have an account) and decided to create a real-world experience in the form of a pop-up bar, which they called the Situation Room, not to be confused with Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room, no betting there. The space was outfitted with tons of bright TV screens, showing everything from news to stock quotes, and even a Bloomberg terminal. So you need to monitor world events while you bet and drink. What could go wrong?
Makena Kelly, audio archives: So, I just walked in. We wait outside for almost an hour and a half.
Brian Barrett: It was a one-weekend kind of thing. So we sent our Washington-based reporter Makena Kelly to check it out.
Makena Kelly, audio archives: Nothing works. There are a few tablets installed. I see people playing what looks like a video game…
Brian Barrett: This seems to have been a complicated experience to say the least. Hi, Makena.
Makena Kelly: It’s good to be here.
Brian Barrett: It’s good to have you. And here’s Kate Knibbs, our in-house expert on all things prediction markets, who also has some thoughts to share. Hi, Kate.
Kate Knibbs: Hi, thanks for inviting me. And I’m really sad that I missed going there in real life.
Makena Kelly: I don’t know.
Kate Knibbs: Yes, but it’s only because I hate myself.
Brian Barrett: ALL RIGHT. So take us there. When you went there and visited the pop-up, what did you expect and what did you actually see? I feel like there’s a gap there.
Makena Kelly: Yeah. So, based on the promotional material that Polymarket put on X and distributed in the press release, my expectations were really high. They had this orb in the promotional images. There are all these Bloomberg terminals. People were supposed to have drinks and place bets and wander around in this sort of highly fluorescent room where there were just endless screens, endless content to monitor whatever situation you wanted to monitor, whether it was who was the next Republican presidential candidate or the war in Iran or things like that. And so, when I got there, it was supposed to open at 5 p.m. It was pouring with rain and we all waited outside for about an hour and a half, soaking wet, and were given drinks outside by a very desolate Polymarket. And when the doors opened, about an hour and a half later than originally scheduled, nothing worked. Absolutely nothing worked. And really, the only promise they kept was an evening of free drinks for everyone who showed up.
Zoe Schiffer: What was the ratio of journalists to…
Makena Kelly: Yeah. So, compared to the reporters and everyone, there were a lot of people leaving the line because it was starting to feel like this place was never going to open. And so everyone who was the casual, “I’m going to come here and have a drink and gawk at the show” has mostly left and all the journalists who were assigned to that, they’ve all mostly stayed there. And later that night, after things opened up, more and more people continued to pour in. Some DOGE guys were there…
Brian Barrett: Of course.
Makena Kelly: …who were seen mixing because they were part of the same kind of social circle…
Brian Barrett: Of course.
Makena Kelly: …like these people. I saw guys wearing Palantir hoodies and a shirt that said – this didn’t make the story because I completely forgot – but he wore this shirt that said, “Surveillance is Palantir’s new sovereignty, something, something.”
Zoe Schiffer: Wow.
Brian Barrett: Before we get too deep into the night, I want to say don’t make you relive this, but we have a tape from Josh Tucker, Polymarket’s marketing director. At that point, he was letting everyone know how bad things were. Can we play this real quick?
Josh Tucker, audio archives: Due to an electrical problem earlier in the evening, we had to reset all the TVs. That being said, we hope you all have a great evening tonight. There are drinks, food, past, apps. No We are here to answer all your questions. Overnight we will remedy this so that the situation can be properly monitored tomorrow. Thank you all for coming. We are delighted to meet you. Thank you all. And back to you.
Makena Kelly, audio archives: Yes. Can I have a glass of white, please?
Unidentified speaker, archived audio: Yeah. Did you want red or white?
Makena Kelly, audio archives: A blank please.
Unidentified speaker, archived audio: Yeah. Do you like a sauvignon blanc?
Makena Kelly, audio archives: Sauvignon blanc is awesome. Thank you so much.
Brian Barrett: I love that we got your drink order there too.
Léa Feiger: Was it good? Was the alcohol at least high end? That’s why I feel, this company makes so much money and they couldn’t even put their screens together. I don’t know. It’s so complicated.
Makena Kelly: So yes, I had a glass of white wine. It was totally fine, but the apps that were going around, I was a little disappointed because the things that I saw were pretzel bites and then these little strawberry pineapple skewers, and that was about it. The second night, they brought pizza from somewhere else and put it in boxes marked Pentagon Pizza. So there was more food the second night. But yes, I must say that I was a little disappointed…
Kate Knibbs: So you went there twice?
Makena Kelly: Yes, Kate. I went there twice.
Kate Knibbs: I missed it.
Zoe Schiffer: Wait, is the Pentagon Pizza case a joke about pizza predicting war?
Makena Kelly: Yeah.
Zoe Schiffer: Oh my God.
Makena Kelly: Because they had those Pentagon pizza trackers. When I came back the second night, yes, I came back the second night. Everything worked for the most part. There were still a few dark screens, but I never saw any real Bloomberg terminals. There were Bloomberg-style surveillance terminals that Polymarket appeared to have developed themselves, but the real $50,000 Bloomberg terminal was nowhere to be found. And yes, the second night, again, it was mostly people looking to gawk at the event, except I found a few people placing bets on platforms like Polymarket and Kalchi. One of them was named William and he said he was in the army, but he wouldn’t give me his full name. And last year he got involved in this for the first time by devoting, I think, his entire tax return to sports betting in Oklahoma City.
Makena Kelly, audio archives: So, you used Kalshi?
William, archival audio: Yes.
Makena Kelly, audio archives: When did you first start using the service?
William, archival audio: Probably when I received my tax return.
Makena Kelly, audio archives: ALL RIGHT.
William, archival audio: So, I filed my taxes pretty early and I was like, “Oh, honey. I got my tax return. What am I going to do with it?” So I was like, “I’ll just put it on Kalshi.”
Makena Kelly: He said he was up and down $100, but didn’t make any major gains. Some of the things we heard. Some people make crazy insider bets and win millions and millions of dollars. He’s just a guy who was interested in it and just plays it for fun it seems.
Brian Barrett: Kate, what do you see when you see a pop-up like this and Polymarket is trying to do it: is this an attempt to legitimize itself by being just a marketing stunt? And how does that relate to what you’re seeing with these companies, which is the explosive growth that they’ve tried to reach as many people and get as many people hooked on what they’re offering?
Kate Knibbs: I mean, this particular event definitely seems like a very simple attempt to woo Washington-based journalists, at least. One thing Makena said kind of sums up what’s going on right now, the thing about the guys in Palantir hoodies. So, I think this is the same week this bar opened. Polymarket announced a partnership with Palantir and Palantir helps them protect the integrity of their sports marketplace. So Palantir is basically going to try to help Polymarket catch insider traders and market manipulators in all sports games, which is pretty wild. In fact, I asked Polymarket last week if they had any other deals with Palantir when I was trying to get them to say anything about whether they were investigating Iran betting, which raised a lot of eyebrows. And they said Palantir only helped them with sports, which I found really weird. And this shows how quickly they are growing, but in an ad hoc and very complicated way, which doesn’t really make sense. Because I was like, “If you’re going to get Palantir involved, why don’t you let them do this geopolitical stuff instead of March Madness?” Yeah, crazy, crazy times.
Léa Feiger: This all seems pretty sketchy, but somehow, like a big step backwards, what does all this tell you guys? Makena, you have now spent two nights reading with all these people. Kate, this is your beach.
Brian Barrett: We know that.
Makena Kelly: Just two guys, just two.
Léa Feiger: We know that. Maybe, yeah.
Makena Kelly: And I returned for brunch Sunday morning.
Léa Feiger: What does this say about this growing popularity, the power of prediction markets, and how this is actually becoming a cultural phenomenon? The fact that they were able to convince people to come out for this, to get excited about this, even though it all vaguely blew up in their face, their name is there. The power, the cultural capital that did not exist a year ago is very present here. What does this tell you?
Kate Knibbs: I mean, I don’t think it’s going to subside anytime soon, at least not while the Trump administration is in power. The Trump administration is so friendly to this industry. Donald Trump Jr. is an advisor to Polymarket and Kalshi. The Trump family is still gearing up, supposedly preparing their own prediction deal, truth predicts, even though I haven’t heard anything about it since late 2025. I have to check that out. But yeah, it’s definitely, I think, the start of something for better or worse. So one of the reasons I was telling you about my unfortunate trip back to Chicago from New York, I was at this Kalshi conference last week that wasn’t open to the public, so it was different from the Polymarket bar, but who it was for was really interesting to me. It was basically about highlighting how Kalshi is already very entrenched in the global financial system and involves all these big financial players. And it was really eye-opening to see how far they had already gone down that path. They announced that day that they had gotten approval for margining, which basically means we’re going to see a lot of large institutions putting a lot more money into these markets sooner rather than later.
Makena Kelly: Yeah. I think my main takeaway from the event and the thing that stood out to me the most that I put in the article was that the guy who ran it, Josh Tucker, who announced that we played the tape from earlier, his last job was at Mr. Beast, doing viral marketing. And I think we talk a lot about where Polymarket is right now, even with people who know the name and all that, it’s really a spectacle. It’s really playing on that and trying to develop its kind of name. And then when I was at the bar too, it was only a block from the CFTC. On K Street, which is colloquially known in Washington as the lobbying center, and then a block away from the one regulator that regulates it, trying to get this great party to say that this is our exit party and we’re here to have this conversation. And they’re there for the spectacle of the explosion of it all. But when it came to following through on the party and planning or having that kind of productive discussion, it wasn’t really visible anywhere. The promotional material on X promoting this event by Polymarket made it a very highly produced event that was going to be a bit supernatural and highly technical. But after spending several hours here, everything is a little weird.
Kate Knibbs: It’s super crazy for me too, because Polymarket threw this whole party in Washington DC. And for now, in most of Polymarket, you are still not legally allowed to bet from the United States. So they’re really trying hard to get their name out there to people who are actually using the product.
Brian Barrett: To recap, we had Palantir, DOGE, Donald Trump Jr., Mr. Beast, and a missing Bloomberg Terminal. I feel like we’re checking a lot of boxes with this event.
Léa Feiger: This is WIRED Mad Libs in all its forms. Yeah.
Zoe Schiffer: That’s our show for today. We’ll link to all the stories we talked about in the show notes. Uncanny Valley is produced by Kaleidoscope Content. Adriana Tapia produced this episode. It was mixed by Amar Lal at Macro Sound. Pran Bandi is our studio engineer in New York. Mark Leyda is our studio engineer in San Francisco. Kimberly Chua is our Senior Digital Production Manager. Kate Osborn is our executive producer and Katie Drummond is WIRED’s global editorial director.
