In today’s episode, hosts Brian Barrett and Zoë Schiffer are joined by Tim Marchman, WIRED’s director of science, politics, and security, to discuss the news of the week—including how far-right influencers spread misinformation in Minneapolis, and why TikTok’s US version is off to a rocky start. Plus, we dive into why some people are currently obsessed with the AI assistant Moltbot.
Articles mentioned in this episode:
- ICE Is Using Palantir’s AI Tools to Sort Through Tips
- Google DeepMind Staffers Ask Leaders to Keep Them ‘Physically Safe’ From ICE
- TikTok Is Now Collecting Even More Data About Its Users. Here Are the 3 Biggest Changes
- Moltbot Is Taking Over Silicon Valley
You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett, Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer, and Tim Marchman on Bluesky at @timmarchman. Write to us at [email protected].
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Brian Barrett: How is everybody doing?
Tim Marchman: I’m doing great.
Zoë Schiffer: Wow.
Brian Barrett: That is something.
Zoë Schiffer: Shocking, I would say.
Brian Barrett: Yeah. Tim, what’s your secret?
Tim Marchman: I am trying and doing an actually pretty good job of keeping in mind that my anxious perceptions do not reflect reality, and that they have to be looked at logically.
Brian Barrett: That’s a better coping mechanism than mine, which is that my kids have discovered Mario Kart, so I’m playing a lot of Mario Kart. Zoë?
Zoë Schiffer: I’m doing fine. I would say that I think I have hit a bit of a mental-emotional wall with what is happening, and I’m really grateful to be doing the work that we do because if I was trying to pretend that my corporate job mattered as I was during the early days of the first Trump presidency when I worked in tech, I’m just so glad not to be back there. That was a tough time.
Brian Barrett: But Zoë, is there anything you’re looking forward to, say, in a day or so?
Zoë Schiffer: OK. Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Showing how well rounded I am, I am going to be seeing the premiere of the Melania Trump movie.
Brian Barrett: Yes.
Zoë Schiffer: The movie that Amazon Studios poured millions and millions and millions of dollars into the trailer. I thought—
Tim Marchman: I have never been more jealous.
Zoë Schiffer: I know. I know. Exceptional work. They made it so dramatic. That woman, as far as I can tell, sorry to say this, does not have any perceptible personality of any sort, but they tried everything to cover that up.
Brian Barrett: Tim, in fairness, I think there’s a safe bet you could still score a ticket.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. Oh yes.
Tim Marchman: I have looked for tickets in the Philadelphia area, and I appear to have my choice. The unfortunate part is that in the city itself, it does not appear to be showing, and so I would have to go to a large suburban mall. I just don’t think I can commit to that. So I’m going to have to wait to watch it on the big screen here at home with a big bucket of popcorn and some sarsaparilla.
Zoë Schiffer: I can’t wait. I’ll be there.
Brian Barrett: You know what? I will too.
Zoë Schiffer: Welcome to WIRED’s Uncanny Valley. I’m Zoë Schiffer, WIRED’s director of business and industry.
Brian Barrett: I’m Brian Barrett, executive editor.
Tim Marchman: And I’m Tim Marchman, director of science, politics, and security. I’ll be filling in for Leah Feiger this week.
Let’s start with discussing the news that’s held our attention this week: ICE activity as it’s been unfolding in Minnesota.
This past weekend, tens of thousands of Minnesotans took to the streets to peacefully protest the increased activity of federal immigration agents in the state, and to document their activities, which have included the fatal shooting of Minneapolis resident Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent, and the arrest of a 5-year-old child, Liam Conejo Ramos. Things escalated when federal agents shot and killed yet another person, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse who was participating in the protests. The Trump administration in recent days, they’ve announced they’re removing Gregory Bovino, a border patrol official who was styled as a commander-at-large. He’s out of Minnesota, and border czar Tom Homan will be taking over operations in the state, but things haven’t really deescalated on the ground. And just last night:
Representative Ilhan Omar, archival audio: ICE could not be reformed. It cannot be rehabilitated. We must abolish ICE for good.
Tim Marchman: Democratic representative Ilhan Omar was sprayed with an unknown substance while she was speaking with constituents at a town hall meeting.
Archival audio:
Ilhan Omar: And DHS Secretary Kristi Noem must resign or face impeachment.
Multiple speakers: Whoa, whoa! What is that? What is that? What did he spray?
Ilhan Omar: I don’t know.
Multiple speakers: Oh my God. Oh my God.
Tim Marchman: So this is really scary, and this incident in particular brings in a big element of this, which is the role of far-right-wing influencers. The nominal pretext for the presence of immigration agents in the state is that the Trump administration decided it wanted to beef up the state’s response to a fraud crisis in its Medicaid program. That crisis is real, but the claims that attracted the administration’s attention to it were not. A right-wing influencer named Nick Shirley played a particular role here with a very influential YouTube video claiming, without proof, that daycare centers that were being operated by Somali residents in Minneapolis had misappropriated millions of dollars, and now we see violence against a member of Congress, and, of course, a Somali American by somebody who, going by his online profile, appears to have been very exercised by such claims. What do you two make of the role of the far right there?
Brian Barrett: Tim, you take it even one step further. It’s not just that he … So he was seemingly inspired by all of these claims, but also as soon as this happened, there was an attempt in certain right-wing influencers’ spheres to spin even the attack on Ilhan Omar as staged. That became its own conspiracy vortex where they said, “Look, you can see her giving him a signal to stage the attack.” And even President Trump speaking to ABC News on the phone soon after it happened said, “She probably staged it herself, knowing her.” It is just sort of, we are stuck in this vortex that we can’t get out of, where anytime anything happens—and we’ve seen it repeatedly throughout ICE’s occupation of Minneapolis and Minnesota—and more broadly, anytime anything happens, there’s this immediate attempt to spin, to smear, to slander, that holds no basis in reality. It’s just sort of the playbook right now. We’re all just playing the playbook. And by “we all,” I mean far-right influencer ne’er-do-wells. Can I say ne’er-do-wells? Zoë how do feel about ne’er-do-wells?
Zoë Schiffer: You live in Alabama. I feel like you absolutely should say ne’er-do-well.
Brian Barrett: Is ne’er-do-well Alabaman? Is that Southern?
Zoë Schiffer: Feels kind of old school in a appealing way. I mean, I was really struck by the kind of instant smear campaign against Alex Pretti. I think what you’re both saying is correct. It really feels like our shared truth has completely disintegrated, and there’s an opportunity for people to try and spin what’s happening in these very wild ways. But just talking about the nurse who was shot and killed, at first they, right-wing influencers and the like, kind of blatantly lie, and say that he was trying to assassinate an ICE official who acted in self-defense. Then they kind of walk that back and say he was maybe in the country illegally? And now it feels like they’ve settled on like, “OK, he was a normal dude, but it was really irresponsible to carry a gun to this protest.” I mean, it’s been fascinating and horrifying to watch this play out in real time.
Brian Barrett: And that’s where you see where that runs into then, Second Amendment rights, which is a big part obviously of the conservative platform. You are actually starting to see some pushback. I think this is one of the first moments that we’ve seen the administration have to backpedal in Trump 2.0 to this extent. I’m not sure that that gets us anywhere in the long run, but it is interesting to see that they have found, apparently, seemingly, some limits that they’re butting up against in terms of what they can say and how far they can spin things.
Tim Marchman: I think that is significant, because the operating theory of Donald Trump and of his adviser, Stephen Miller, have been that you never concede, you never retreat, that to admit weakness is to invite attack. And there is something to that. 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 are instantly, as soon as this news comes out, calling Pretti a terrorist, calling him an assassin, seeing things that were easily disproved. They have been forced to walk that back, and there’s an ongoing leak war among factions within the administration, people pointing fingers at each other. That is a bit of a new development. This White House has not been willing to say it’s wrong, to walk anything back.
And I think they’re correct that ceding the power of public opinion, ceding the power of people they’re hearing from, whether they be an influential op-ed writers, elected Republican officials, as well as the broader public, that does show that they cannot impose their will on reality without having to account for reality. And that is something I think people can be optimistic or maybe a little less doomy about.
Speaking of flip-flopping, let’s take a look at what Silicon Valley leaders were saying and doing on all of this. So on Saturday, hours after federal agents killed Pretti, a group of CEOs opted to spend Saturday night at a private White House screening of the Amazon MGM Studios–produced Melania documentary about the First Lady. They included Apple’s Tim Cook, Amazon’s Andy Jassy, and AMD’s Lisa Su. We have also had other news that Brett Ratner, the director of the project, who is somewhat notorious for many reasons, among them not being a gem to work for, was not a gem to work for in this production.
Why have you been hearing from sources about this, Zoë?
Zoë Schiffer: I mean, so this is one of those moments where I do feel like the levity and gravity of the situation are both really apparent. The very day that Alex Pretti is shot, we see this news that these CEOs are apparently gathering at the White House. And I think Brian and me were both like, “Surely Tim Cook is going to say that there was weather trouble, and his plane couldn’t make it.” But in fact, we scour social media and there are pictures of him there. There’s pictures of Lisa Su there. So they were very much present at the screening.
I’ve really felt like this moment was kind of fascinating, because it’s been pretty much since 2018 George Floyd protests that we’ve really seen a lot of tech worker activism across Silicon Valley. There’ve been bits and pieces that have popped up, but for the most part, I feel like Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover marked this moment where people got kind of quiet after that, and were less willing to speak up and speak out. I think people were really nervous about their jobs. The labor market was weak. Now we’re in this moment where a lot of those same concerns are still present, but I feel like the people that I’ve been talking to who work at Apple and these other companies are like, “This was a real tipping point. This was so upsetting.” And they were sending just even internally messages 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 bit of time. Yeah, a little time.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, a little bit of time to come up with a statement internally. And the statement was pretty tepid to say the least, but he did say, “This is a really trying moment.” And essentially, he tried to spin his presence at the White House by saying that he had used the opportunity to talk to President Trump about his views, I mean, seemingly implying that he had spoken to him about immigration.
Brian Barrett: And we can go back and look. I think he even said, “I’ve talked to President Trump this week.” I think he even ducked the idea. I don’t think he talked to him in person. I think he just sort of gave him a follow-up call later after he’d had some time to think about or something. It’s all pretty ridiculous.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I mean, I hate to speculate, but I’m just going to say right now, I find that exceedingly difficult to believe, Tim Cook is known first and foremost as being a diplomat and using his position to further Apple and Apple’s interests. I don’t think many of these CEOs see it as in their interest or their company’s interests to go head-to-head with President Trump in any meaningful way. But we have seen rank-and-file employees really use this moment to speak up, to post on X and say, “This is not OK.”
We also had a scoop this week from Maxwell Zeff, one of our great AI reporters here at WIRED, who was talking about Google DeepMind workers saying that a federal agent had showed up at Google’s Cambridge office in the fall, and they were saying to their leadership, “What are you doing to keep us safe?” I think it’s easy to look at a statement like that, and kind of roll your eyes and be like, these well-paid tech workers are centering themselves in this moment. At the same time, Silicon Valley is made up of a workforce that’s heavily immigrants, it’s highly-skilled workers from foreign countries. And I think that people have legitimate concerns about their own safety, this feeling that maybe your wealth and power, your employment won’t necessarily keep you safe in this moment.
Brian Barrett: I mean, to put this into even sharper perspective, another scoop we had this week from Makena Kelly was about Palantir. Palantir, which works so closely with the government in all things, has a $30 million contract with DHS and ICE to build a platform literally called Immigration OS, whose sole purpose is to gather data for deportations. Even Palantir employees are asking in their public Slack, “What can we do to stop this, to knock this off?” And the fact that we’re in a world where Palantir employees are way out ahead of, say, Tim Cook or these other CEOs is baffling. We’re really in a bit of an upside down place. And I think notably too, Palantir executives said, “Well, no, this is what we do,” and they’re going to keep doing what they do. And so is Apple and so are all these other companies. I think until it translates into something actionable, it’s all just PR.
Tim Marchman: So a question I have for both of you is, do you think that these leaders understand the stakes here? Because one of the things that was really notable to me in the discussions that Palantir workers were having in this public Slack is people asking about the long-term consequences. Does Palantir not foresee the possibility of a future Democratic administration that might cancel their contracts, or the consequences of public revulsion? And pretty universally among these barons of tech, they seem to be acting as if there’s not going to be a moment after this one. And that’s a thing I have a really hard time getting my head around.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I would say that the oligarchs in Russia have a different view of how this has played out. When you bend the knee and say you’re going to absolutely fall in line, you put yourself in a kind of precarious position, where the second that you stray from the party line, swift action will be taken against you, and certainly your money won’t protect you. But I think that’s kind of the, I hate to say this, but the genius of what Trump is doing, because I think when you ask people to, again and again, move their moral line closer and closer to whatever his line is, then they’re kind of like, “Well, we already showed up at the inauguration. We already praised Trump in X, Y, Z way. We already did all of this stuff to kind of position our company to win in this moment.” And so it feels like kind of like a sunk cost, like, “OK, if you’re going to turn away in this moment, you’ve lost everything you did up to that point.”
Brian Barrett: I am not saying this to excuse what’s going on, but at the end of the day, they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders.
Zoë Schiffer: Oh, how dare you bring that word into this space.
Brian Barrett: No, sorry, but they do. I’m sorry, but they do. Ne’er-do-wells with fiduciary responsibilities. But Donald Trump has proven, he has shown that he can tank a company overnight, or he can have the US demand that it take a big stake in it overnight. He can do so much to these companies in the short term that I understand why they feel the risk and the threat. But again, I don’t agree with how they’re handling it.
Speaking of the US having a major impact on companies, can we switch it up? Can we talk a little bit about TikTok?
Zoë Schiffer: We have to.
Brian Barrett: Yes. Thank you. Good. Not that it’s lighter, but it’s not as heavy. So the US version of TikTok is here, right? We are officially, as of last week on January 22nd, we are officially in the brave new world where TikTok is owned by various US-based shareholders, but also still ByteDance kind of, and the algorithm is the same. And it’s all just kind of a lot for some for show and some for the benefit of friends of Donald Trump. But after the launch, it was a little bit rocky.
Archival audio clip: All right, TikTok, what the hell is going on?
Brian Barrett: There were some complaints from users that felt as though critical content of ICE and Donald Trump was being repressed.
Archival audio clip: TikTok is now censoring our content a lot more now, especially since this switchover.
Archival audio clip: My views on this app right now are trash and they have been ever since it was bought by Larry Ellison.
Archival audio clip: Apparently my face and the news is against the community guidelines.
Zoë Schiffer: And this was kind of fascinating because TikTok was having issues in the United States. The app was essentially down for a large swath of users, but that issue was being interpreted as censorship, which is an accusation that has plagued TikTok for years and years now. In fact, it’s kind of partly why we’re in the moment we are in, where it’s been transferred, where TikTok US has been transferred to majority US owners. So we saw people speculating that the algorithm had been changed basically to please Donald Trump.
Tim Marchman: It’s a problem in its own right, whether or not people can be convinced that something that they say is due to a data center power outage due to the huge storm that hit the US this week is in fact what’s behind it. It seems a pretty glaring instance of the new ownership destroying credibility with a lot of the user base.
Brian Barrett: We alluded a little bit to the ownership before, but here’s who that is. It is Oracle owns 15 percent of the TikTok USDS Joint Venture. Larry Ellison is Oracle’s cofounder. He’s a very close ally of Donald Trump. Larry Ellison’s son, David Ellison, CEO of Paramount Skydance, who installed Bari Weiss at the head of CBS News, CBS News trending in a more Trump-friendly direction. So the concern is that it’s sort of part of this broader media capture and cultural capture by Donald Trump and adjacent interests. So people are quick to look out, look for, hey, any kind of change that seems like might be reflective of that, they’re going to jump on that.
Tim Marchman: And this is a web of interlocking interest. One of the things that Paramount, now controlled by Larry Ellison’s son, David, did, was spend billions and billions and billions of dollars on the exclusive rights to the Ultimate Fighting Championship, which will be hosting a cage match on the White House lawn to celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday, and is a cultural space where Donald Trump has attempted to dominate and reach out to young men. So it’s totally reasonable to look at them all as an interlocking series of MAGA-friendly spaces owned by associates of the White House.
Zoë Schiffer: God willing, that first case match will be Elon Musk v. Mark Zuckerberg, because we’ve been waiting now years for that.
Brian Barrett: We’re due. We’re due for that.
Tim Marchman: I’m praying.
Brian Barrett: I was told that was going to happen years ago.
Zoë Schiffer: I know. I was ready. I was ready. So the other reason that this trust issue I think is a potential problem for TikTok is that the app is changing its terms of service and it’s actually asking for more permissions from US users. So one thing that it’s asking for specifically, WIRED reported this week, is to add more granular location tracking. So before, the app didn’t collect precise GPS-derived location on US users, but now if you give the app permission, it’s going to do exactly that. Basically it wants to know your exact whereabouts, presumably for advertising purposes, but that is something that requires a fair amount of trust between users and the company, which is something that TikTok seems to be lacking in this moment in particular.
Brian Barrett: And also the kind of thing that people readily click through and don’t realize is happening, right? TikTok also now tracking data. Anything you put into any of its AI tools, if you put in a prompt or any kind of info you give it there, it’s going to track that data, it’s going to use it.
Again, all of this ultimately used to serve you ads, but it is the principle of it, and it is the sort of lack of the opacity of it, the lack of clarity, just sort of, oh, all of a sudden this is happening. And I think it is a legitimate thing to sort of keep a close eye, even if it hasn’t happened yet, on how TikTok’s algorithm changes in more subtle ways.
I don’t think if there is going to be some kind of manipulation of TikTok, I don’t think it would be as hamfisted as you can’t post about ICE. I do think you can see things changing in terms of what people encounter in their feeds and what gets promoted and what’s not, because that fits in the black box. That’s something that you can’t sort of quantify from the outside, but can sort of have an effect on user sentiment, which is, by the way, the exact thing they were trying to get around happening when they started this process in the first place of getting TikTok out of Chinese ownership.
Tim Marchman: Another problem here is just that this is with TikTok in particular, an infamously difficult thing to track. A few years ago, when researchers had API level access to X, for instance, they were able to do a lot of really impressive sentiment analysis and just tracking how things worked. Without that kind of access to X now, that work is difficult and unto impossible. And TikTok is much slipperier because it’s such a personalized algorithm. So it’s one thing to just be aware of is that we may not be able to track, with a lot of confidence, changes made to what it’s serving users, even if we’re anecdotally pretty sure it is changing. So it’s not a fun thing to be thinking about.
Zoë Schiffer: Now that we’re talking about apps, I’m going to pull us to our lightest segment yet.
Brian Barrett: I like how we’re progressing.
Zoë Schiffer: Yes.
Brian Barrett: We’re just sort of easing up as we go.
Zoë Schiffer: Exactly. I think this one’s genuinely fun.
Tim Marchman: We’ll leave here in a great mood.
Zoë Schiffer: Yes. Have you guys heard of ClawdBot now known as MoltBot?
Brian Barrett: So I have, but I desperately need you to explain why I should or should not buy a Mac Mini, and put it on it and use it.
Tim Marchman: Same. This is in my peripheral vision, but I’ll be learning as we go here.
Zoë Schiffer: I think Tim will need 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 through Will Knight’s great reporting on WIRED.com, is that it’s basically an AI assistant that connects a lot of different apps on your computer. It runs locally, and crucially, you can talk with it over a messaging app. So send it commands, and then it’ll go figure out how to execute and run your life for you. The caveat, as with all AI assistants, is that when you hear, “Wow, AI assistant is going to run your life.” At least to me, I’m like, “Can it submit an expense report? Because I would give it any amount of information to make that happen.”
But while there are specific circumstances of people using it to execute really complex tasks like that, a lot of the time they’re using it to schedule meetings, send a note, kind of manage their day-to-day calendar almost. And it’s a lot of work. It’s a pretty complex setup for that level of assistance.
Brian Barrett: It’s so interesting that this seems to be the real breakthrough AI agent to me because it doesn’t come from Google or OpenAI or Anthropic. It comes from a guy named Peter who just built-
Zoë Schiffer: Peter Steinberger.
Brian Barrett: Yes, Peter Steinberger built it by himself, just wanted to figure out if he could make something work, not even like … He was playing around with voice memo stuff, I believe. And then all of a sudden realized, “Wait, I’ve made the most useful AI agent yet.”?
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I mean, this is kind of fascinating because we’ll talk to him and he was like, yeah, basically he sent the app a voice memo, and that bot was able to make 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 kind of amazing.
I think it’s really interesting because I think there’s this sense that the company that will win or the set of companies that will win in this moment will be the one that has far and away the most sophisticated large language model. But in fact, what users want a lot of the time is kind of a friendly, easy-to-use interface, this thing that can connect a lot of different parts and just be a normal person working on your behalf in the background. And so I think it will be interesting to see the app layer built on top of these really-sophisticated LLMs take off I think in the next year or so.
Brian Barrett: Yeah, because what you said, as you said, the setup is hard, but actually using it, you just send a text, and say, “Hey, can you handle this invoice?” We’ll talk to one guy who is trying to use MoltBot to run his whole small business basically, process invoices, interact with customers. So it is like the front end is difficult, but from there, you’ve got a little buddy working in the background typing away for you.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. Will was kind of MoltBot-pilled by the end of this reporting. He was messaging me on the side being like, “Do you think Condé Nast would let me set this up for everyone?” And I was like, “No, in no world.”
Brian Barrett: No, I don’t think so.
Zoë Schiffer: Which brings me to, there was one person he talked to who gave it, I think credit card information or login information for his Amazon account was having it buy products on his behalf. Tim, I think we’re coming to the segment where you can tell us—
Brian Barrett: “This is a terrible idea.”
Zoë Schiffer: “This is a bad idea.”
Tim Marchman: I don’t think you need to get too technical here to see why this is a bad idea. If you just take a step back, one bit of advice that people who think really seriously about security will tell you is not to freak out about the capabilities of a program or vulnerabilities that you might be introducing into your life by using something, but just asking you to model the threat. What is the worst case scenario that could happen if this goes wrong?
So if you’re dealing with something fairly low stakes, that might not be a very big deal. And if you want to conceptually say, “What is the worst thing that could happen here if I use this to automate my comic book poll lists?” It will not have access to my email, it will not have access to my bank accounts, it will not have access to sensitive work information. I just want to make it a little bit easier to order comic books, that might be just fine because the worst case scenario is that you order too many comic books or not enough, and you tell the guy at the comic book store, “My robot messed up. Let’s get this sorted out. I did not actually order 500 copies of Batman.
If you’re dealing with medical info, financial info, you should assume that you are putting that on the public internet. That’s not necessarily going to happen. It’s not likely that that’s going to happen, but that’s what you should be prepared for. And that’s the thing I can’t get my head around, is how you would allow something that even can access the internet to carry out these really sensitive tasks. There are going to be a lot of engineers who are thinking about very clever solutions to that, but it’s just a fundamental thing I have an issue with, and I would encourage people to be very careful when playing around with these things, and certainly not to be giving them direct access to anything they wouldn’t want their mom to be able to see.
Brian Barrett: Yeah. Your mom does not want to know how many Batman comic books you are buying, Tim. The one thing with these is their usefulness is proportional to how much information you give them. And so it’s sort of a dangerous thing where it’s like, “Oh, actually this is really good at managing my calendar. I wonder what else it can do.” All those what-elses involve increasing your exposure. And while MoltBot does run locally on your own little computer, it doesn’t have to. You can run it in the cloud. Some people want to, and I don’t know that they’re necessarily aware of or care about the risks that you just talked about.
Zoë Schiffer: I think also it’s a good moment to bring in the IP angle. You might be asking yourself, why did ClawdBot change its very cute name to MoltBot? And that’s a great question. Apparently it’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 a very poetic because it was C-L-A-W-D bot. So the molting is the shedding of the Shell, I think? So it’s shedding the ClawdBot name.
Zoë Schiffer: Beautiful.
Brian Barrett: … to become Moltbot.
Zoë Schiffer: Although he did hint at Will that he plans to change it, if not back to something else in the future. So stay tuned.
Brian Barrett: I want to say too, this may seem like far away for a lot of people. The idea of, I’m probably not going to buy a Mac Mini and set up Moltbot tomorrow, but I do use Google Chrome, and there’s more AI agent news happening there. Google just Wednesday announced an autobrowse feature in Chrome. This is for if you have a paid AI plan with Google, but it is sort of similar in that Google is giving you an AI agent that will browse the web for you, go shopping for you, book flights for you. That is much more mainstream, and built into by far the most popular browser in the world and going to be a lot of people’s, I think, first introduction to AI agents, especially if and as they take it out of those paid tiers, and make it available to everybody, which you can definitely see them doing. They’ve done that with other AI products in the past.
Tim Marchman: I just hope people are segmenting things here, and that for instance, if you want to play around with this and give it access to your credit card information, you’re giving it a card that you would not prevent you from being able to pay your mortgage if it got drained through some malware injection. Use common sense here.
Zoë Schiffer: Well, now you heard it here first, unlike the President of the United States and seemingly Elon Musk, Tim Marchman is pro data silos, if you remember that executive order.
Brian Barrett: Look at that.
Zoë Schiffer: I think WIRED.com is pro data silos for the most part.
Brian Barrett: Yeah. We love a data silo.
Zoë Schiffer: Coming up after the break, we’ll share our WIRED/TIRED picks for the week. Stay with us.
It’s time for the WIRED/TIRED segment. Whatever is new and cool is WIRED, whatever is passé, we’re calling TIRED. Are we ready, Brian and Tim?
Brian Barrett: I’m ready.
Tim Marchman: I’m ready.
Zoë Schiffer: Tim, I’m going to say you go first. Yeah.
Tim Marchman: My WIRED thing is non-violent resistance. I think that in some quarters there has been a lot of impatience with the idea that passively resisting violence is effective that it works. It is effective. It does work. It is not weak. It is the strongest tool you have. This is the message of many world religions and many social movements over many centuries. And I think that what we’re seeing in Minnesota, the discipline, the care for other people, the willingness to physically put yourself between the state and those it is attacking is a testament to its power. And the fact that that is having concrete effects on personnel, and to some extent, policy and politics shows that what is old is new here.
Zoë Schiffer: I love that. Brian, I hope yours is somewhere in the middle of where mine is and where Tim’s is because I can’t describe how far apart my WIRED and TIRED is this week, although I completely align with what Tim just said.
Brian Barrett: No, mine sort of takes a different tack. It’s on a different 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 doomsday, put out every year by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. This week, they announced that we are now 85 seconds to midnight. That is the closest to midnight we have ever been. I appreciate what the doomsday clock is trying to do, but I feel like at a certain point, whether I’m 85 or 88 seconds to midnight, I know that things are bad. And I don’t know that quantifying it in that way helps me process it any better. So I’m tired of the Doomsday Clock.
WIRED: quantum logic clocks. This is a little bit older, but it is the most precise clock in the world down to the 19th decimal place, created by researchers at the National Institute for Standard and Technology. It’s great, it’s accurate, and it lets you say the phrase “quantum logic clock” in casual conversation. I’m going to say that’s WIRED.
Zoë Schiffer: OK. Well, I wish I had thought of something a little more high-minded, but TIRED to me is baby iPads—no shade to anyone who has to give their kid a screen for literally any reason. I support you. I see you, I am you frequently. However, Boone, one of our dear colleagues here at WIRED.com gave me a AI-powered, I think it’s a hamster. It’s called Moflin. Have you guys heard of this?
Brian Barrett: I have not.
Zoë Schiffer: I gave it to Ava, my four-year-old, over the weekend, and she has never loved anything as much as she loves this hamster. It makes little noises. I’m completely unclear on how AI is involved or if it is involved at all. It kind of wakes up and moves.
Brian Barrett: When you say AI-powered hamster—
Zoë Schiffer: I think that it’s a marketing term, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that. But supposedly it, as you interact with it, learns your cues and interacts accordingly. Literally all it can do is make little squeaking noises and kind of roll around on the ground. There’s no other action associated with it, but she’s completely obsessed with it. Boone named it Puff, so Ava has also named it Puff, and now it lives at our house, and she gives it naps in it’s plug bed because it does need to be plugged in every so often. And I don’t know. It’s very delightful.
Brian Barrett: God, I would kill for a plug bed.
Zoë Schiffer: I know. I know. This is the most expensive item she owns.
Brian Barrett: Wow. Well, it’s all that AI.
Zoë Schiffer: Yes, exactly. It’s that large language model running in the background.
Brian Barrett: That’s our show for today. We’ll link all the stories we spoke about today in the show notes. Adriana Tapia produced this episode, Amar Lal at Macro Sound mixed this episode, Matt Giles and Daniel Roman fact-checked this episode, Mark Leyda was our San Francisco studio engineer, Kate Osborn is our executive producer, and Katie Drummond is WIRED’s global editorial director.