極秘だったネイサン・フィールダー取材の裏側／マスクはあなたの子どもにSpaceX株を配るのか？

AI can make businesses faster. It can also make mistakes, expose data, and execute the wrong instructions faster. ThreatLocker helps organizations set boundaries AI cannot ignore by controlling what applications can run, what they can reach, and how they interact with sensitive resources. Innovation needs more than good intentions. It needs limits. Control AI with zero trust at threatlocker.com slash wired. That's T-H-R-E-A-T-L-O-C-K-E-R dot com slash wired. Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Brian Barrett, Executive Editor. And I'm Leah Feiger, Director of Politics and Science. This week, we're diving into the behind the scenes of our interview with Nathan Fielder. Wired's Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond was among a small group of people who saw Fielder's latest documentary, You Can See Everything, way before its release. She spoke with Fielder at length and will be joining us to share what stayed with her after their interview.

We'll also get into Anthropic and Elon Musk pledging to share their riches with the public. Anthropic announced that it would commit 5% of company shares to a public benefit fund. And Musk followed suit by promising he would give one SpaceX share to every child in America. We'll discuss the motivations behind these pledges and the chances that they'll actually happen. And we're also going to take a look at the harassment campaign that has hit election offices across the country just two weeks before the midterms. A Wired investigation found that election offices in at least 32 states have received suspicious letters, some of them containing white powder. We'll talk through what happened and how election officials are responding. If you've been online this past week, chances are you've heard about Nathan Fielder and co-director Lance Oppenheim's latest documentary, You Can See Everything. The documentary follows Fielder, a graduate of Canada's top business schools. Fun fact, as he spends a month inside Elizabeth Holmes' home in the weeks before she went to prison,

Holmes was convicted back in 2022 for defrauding investors with Theranos, her blood-testing startup. Turns out the speedy and accurate blood tests were fake. Innovative tech didn't actually exist. More importantly, though, the film was kept secret for three years. Only a few dozen people saw it before it debuted at the Telluride Film Festival. One of those people, Wired's global editorial director, Katie Drummond. She had signed an NDA to hear what the film was about, got Nathan Fielder to be on Wired's cover, and sat down with them for almost an hour and a half. Katie, thank you for joining us. What a wonderful introduction. You made me sound so special. Thank you, Brian. I'm so happy to be here. Yeah, I'm also excited, genuinely, because this is, I think, our first Uncanny Valley crossover episode. It is. Katie, what were your first thoughts when Fielder's publicist reached out? Tell us everything. I'll tell you. You can hear everything. I was on my way to dinner with a very good friend, and I was in an Uber, and I got an email from him that said, do you have a few minutes to talk about Nathan Fielder?

and if you know me at all and and my taste in comedy and the kind of tv i watch you would know that i have many minutes to talk about nathan fielder and i would talk about nathan fielder anytime i'm i'm genuinely a big fan i think his stuff is so so brilliant and so clever and i don't want to say genius because i just think that's a step too far but i think it's very very good i'm a big fan so i wrote back and said i have all the time in the world um and we talked that night and he just said, you know, Nathan has this project coming out. Only a few dozen people know what it is. And I can't tell you anything else about it until you agree to sign an NDA. But would you be interested in him for a cover? And do you have a cover that you could put him on this fall? And to be honest, I had no idea if we had a cover that we could put him on this fall. Like I couldn't even remember if we had another print issue coming out this year. But I was just like, yes, of course, we totally have a cover. Like, I just, you know, I lied. And then immediately

texted Rehan, who runs the print magazine, and was like, do we have a cover available this fall? And then it turned out that we did. And I signed an NDA and she signed an NDA as well. And only after we signed the NDAs, did they even say like, it's a movie. Like, I thought it could have been anything. That's how little they were willing to share with us until we agreed not to talk about it. Were you hesitant at all? Like, could this have been a bit? There were times when I was sort of like, are we somehow being incorporated into the joke? Like, when they did the rehearsal season two, I don't know if listeners have seen it. If you haven't, you should. I think it's incredible. But Nathan did this CNN appearance with Wolf Blitzer. Here with us now, comedian, 737 pilot and host of the rehearsal, Nathan Fielder. Where he very seriously talked about aviation safety in a way that I think CNN was happy with. But if I, in my role running Wired, if that happened to me, I don't know that I would be happy about like being part of the joke. So I definitely worried about that.

But once we saw the movie and talked to them more about what they wanted to do, it was pretty clear that this was just a good faith, earnest attempt to get Nathan to do some press, which he does not often do. It wasn't a bit turned out to be a real interview. But one thing I thought was really interesting about it was he turned the tables on you at some point. It felt like he sort of started trying to interview you. And I guess what was that like in the moment? And did you sort of like, you know, you sort of catch yourself. It's a sort of a fun moment. I think an interviewer would say, wait a minute, you derailed me. That was rude. What was it like actually trying to interview someone who was so used to being on the other end of it? It was a tough interview. He was very pleasant. He was totally lovely. And it was a very good faith conversation. But he doesn't like being interviewed. I mean, he says that in the interview. He says, I hate this. I hate that this is happening to me right now. Relatable. I think he genuinely doesn't feel very comfortable expressing himself with words.

I think he has talked before in interviews about how that is a real weakness for him. And so I think he feels uncomfortable trying to do it. and I think he did not want to share his feelings about what he experienced making the film because he didn't want that to inform the opinion of someone going in to see the movie. If they think like, well, Nathan thought this about Elizabeth and he thought this about Elizabeth's partner and he thought this and this about Theranos, he didn't want that to color how people saw the movie and so he felt much more comfortable asking me questions about what I thought about the movie and I think genuinely he is still trying to figure out what happened to him in the three years that he was making it and asking people what they thought is helpful for him. And I suppose this is a good time to say for all of our listeners that if you haven't seen the film yet, there's no spoilers in this interview. Both of you did a really good job of skating around that, but you did talk about seeing the film twice and having different reactions each time. Your conversation with him, as spoiler-free as it was, as difficult as it was to keep him on track,

to get him to share his own viewpoints here, did it change at all how you saw the film? Oh, that's interesting. You know, the conversation and then reading the interview back, which I had to do many times as we edited it and got it ready to publish it, and then looking at the questions I asked him and thinking about why I asked certain questions in the moment did make me reflect on the movie more. There was one thing I said to him in the interview where I said, you know, we don't really know, Nathan, like what you are thinking in the film and sort of how you feel about these people. And then I thought more about that afterwards and disagreed with myself in the end where I'm like, no, it actually is pretty clear in his facial expressions or how he talks to people or even knowing that he was a co-director on the film. right? So he made decisions about what they included and what they didn't include and how they frame and set up certain subjects. So obviously, with all of those things combined, we do get a sense of what his point of view is, right? You can tell what the filmmaker's point

of view is to some extent as you watching the movie So it did make me think a lot about the film I mean I will say I have thought way too much about this movie just because I been getting ready for this interview doing the interview, editing the interview, getting ready to publish it. I am ready to stop thinking about it. I would like that to happen. This is your life now. I hope not. I was going to say, but Katie, the interview's gotten a lot of attention since it published. You've gotten a lot of attention since it published for the interview. What has been what's it been like? I think as journalists, you know, the adage is you don't want to become the story. Not that you've become the story here, but, you know, I feel like there's been a lot of demands on your time. You've been on TVPN, a lifelong goal of yours. You're on Uncanny Valley, another lifelong goal. What has it been like processing sort of being wrapped up in this sort of engine of attention that the documentary has been getting? You know, I pivoted from being a reporter to being an editor for exactly this reason, which is that I really didn't like getting attention on the Internet.

I found it very unpleasant. I continue to find it unpleasant. So in that regard, I don't like it. You know, I like to talk to commenters and sort of respond to good faith things. But then you also, you know, it's 830 at night and you're on Reddit and you read a thread and people are like, this is some of the worst writing I've ever seen, you know, and you're like, oh, wow. okay, that person doesn't like me, and that's hard. I think I just want to hopefully genuinely encourage people to see the movie. And I don't mean that because I'm being paid to do an advertisement for them. I'm certainly not. It's just a really interesting project. And so I'm just really proud that we were able to play a teeny tiny part in it. You know, if I could clear up one thing that has generated some public attention since the interview came out is that my Google search results now lean heavily towards Katie Drummond felon, Katie Drummond criminal, Katie Drummond conviction. I just want to be very clear. It can be hard to read tone in writing sometimes.

That was a joke. But in the eyes of AI overviews, you are forever. And that's how this movie ruined my career. Yeah, that's that's really the subject line. Not only did you release this interview, Wired released a slate of stories related to Nathan Fielder. And in one piece, former Wired editor Adam Rogers discusses how the magazine was one of really the first outlets back in the early 2010s to praise Theranos, to give them all of this public attention. So there's this real reckoning that happens in that story. I'm really curious. I would love to hear from you kind of about the decisions that went into even like publicizing this mistake and this like clearly new this division between like old era and new era. Yeah, I was when I read Adam's story, I read a draft of it last week. I was so blown away. I mean, if anyone listening hasn't read it, it's such it's such a great piece of writing and it's such a sharp reckoning with the editorial decisions that were made around that interview.

You know, I would just say I think that that piece and this film say a lot about where Wired is in this moment, right? And there were so many really smart people who worked at Wired in that era. It's not like this was a bunch of dumb people making dumb decisions. It was really smart people making really smart decisions. But they existed and Wired operated in this context where even in sort of the early 2010s, as, you know, a lot of controversy was starting to emerge around these tech companies and sort of the rise of social media and the ills that came with that, there was still much more a culture of celebrating and lionizing startup founders and, you know, really wild emerging ideas, maybe not giving them the scrutiny that they ought to have had. I think Liz Holmes played into that really effectively. I think that her relative youth and her gender were important factors there, that the media loved the idea of a young woman becoming this self-made billionaire with this incredible innovation in personalized medicine.

I think that the journalist who did that interview in 2014 asked Liz hard questions, didn't necessarily get satisfying answers. But I think that, as Adam points out, the Wired of today would have asked much tougher questions or would have even had a much higher bar to cover Theranos to begin with. I don't know that we necessarily would have looked at this startup that hadn't actually made many inroads into commercializing their product and said, yeah, that feels like something we should do a straight interview on. I don't know that we would have even made that decision. So I just think, again, it was really smart people making smart decisions within the context that they were operating at the time. But I think that context has really changed. And I think there's a lot more necessary skepticism of these people and their ideas and where this money is coming from and how and why they're getting that money to begin with and what they're doing with it. Katie, thank you so much for being here. Thank you, guys. AI can make businesses faster.

It can also make mistakes, expose data, and execute the wrong instructions faster. ThreatLocker helps organizations set boundaries AI cannot ignore by controlling what applications can run, what they can reach, and how they interact with sensitive resources. Innovation needs more than good intentions. It needs limits. Control AI with zero trust at ThreatLocker.com slash Wired. That's T-H-R-E-A-T-L-O-C-K-E-R dot com slash Wired. Shifting gears to current tech companies, some of them have been on a philanthropic streak of sorts. On Sunday, Anthropic said it would commit 5% of its shares to a public benefit fund meant to address AI's impact on the labor market. A day later, Elon Musk, not wanting to be left out, apparently posted on X that next year he's going to give one SpaceX share to every kid in America. And that this will be the first of many. Both announcements don't contain much detail on how this will actually happen.

You'll be shocked to hear. According to the anthropic statement, though, the fund could make charitable donations or direct money to, quote, specific populations. We love a specific population. Musk gave no further details for his plan, but that didn't stop President Trump from publicly thanking him. Lee, are you excited for all the shares in AI companies that you and future generations of America are going to get? I can't wait, Brian. I mean, I've just been bated breath for this to happen. I have so many thoughts about this, and I'm sure that you do as well. The idea of tech companies using wealth for public good has been an ongoing conversation for literal decades, and it's stalled in recent years. It just 100% has. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, famously is anti-philanthropy, which is very new, to be clear, from tech of even a decade ago, that at the very least, you had Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

You had an outpour of support for the climate corners of the tech industry and dumping money into that. That's all dried up, and I'm not honestly sure that we've spent enough time talking about that. A lot of these companies have kind of relied on like the positive press from their forebears literally 15 years ago. And so the idea that like there's now this whole philanthropic streak of, as you said, sorts is of note. It's the idea that like, oh, OK, we're actually that unpopular that we need to weigh in to some respect. We're going to take your jobs, but we're going to now fund the specific populations, question mark, whose jobs were taken? I have so many questions here. No, that's the thing. And I think we can sort of disambiguate the must thing from the anthropocene, because the must thing, A, Elon Musk makes so many promises. Oh, my God. Yeah, like that doesn't even count to me. The fact that people were sharing it credulously. I sorry Natasha Lyonne like get a grip This is clearly not occurring And even if he does it is a lot of money In fairness it billion or so based on the current stock price But it 0 of overall SpaceX stock

And it's not happening. It's just not happening. And even if it did, it would be $150 in everybody's account, which, like, it's not going to make anybody rich. It's fine. So set that aside for a moment. But let's talk about Anthropic, because I do think, to your point, it's philanthropy, but it's philanthropy born of this sense that we're going to make all the jobs go away. So we need it is. It is. It is really we're going to sort of start making some inroads towards universal basic income. But it's UBI as dictated by Anthropic. It's this sense of we're going to be the ones to figure out not only how AI is going to reshape society, but we're going to be the ones responsible for then making sure everybody's okay. The amount of power that they're sort of trying to invest in themselves is really astonishing. We live in an unregulated hellhole. Like, put it on a T-shirt. Anthropic is preparing for a trillion-dollar IPO right now.

And I know it's me, so I have to say it. The midterms are in two weeks. And all anyone is talking about, at least a portion of these polls, is data centers, how unpopular they are, how unpopular AI is. The use of AI is a bipartisan issue at this point, which is fascinating. We should really be talking about how impressive it is that these massive companies have made so many people hate them so quickly. So it's all this timing, all of these, like, don't look at the man behind the curtain facade that I can't, I just can't get over. One thing that's kind of fun here, I can't take credit for this observation. This is Matt Living in Money, Southern Liver, but he made this point that I think is really apt, which is that the ways in which this money is being proposed to be distributed really reflects each company's or individual's sense of self. So you've got Anthropic, as we talked about. Only we have the power. We're the only ones responsible enough to do this. You've got Elon Musk, very individual entrepreneurship.

We're going to give everybody a little stock and see where it goes. And then you also had, we haven't confirmed this independently, but OpenAI reportedly in July, according to the Financial Times, proposed or considered giving the U.S. government a 5% stake, which is sort of OpenAI saying, hey, we'll play ball. You know, we'll work with the government. We'll figure this out. All different visions of how AI fits into society, how it relates to government, how it relates to individuals. and none of them probably great because they all presume this world in which other sources of money are not going to be here because of AI. No, I think that's obviously a really smart way to put it, like the idea of all of these companies kind of figuring out their own ways to talk about this, especially because like at the end of the day, with regulatory measures and proposals changing basically hourly at this point, the government is about to go through a pretty big shift. And regardless of what happens in these elections, Trump is a lame duck president.

There is a very different sense of appeal that you have to make. Are you still promising that 5% if you're open AI to like a democratic controlled Congress? I don't know. And I'm very curious to see like how that will all kind of move around. But to me, it also just gets into this larger idea of like what does what is the tech world's role in like philanthropic movements, especially as they're shutting down their own internal CSR like complaint streams as well. You know, we've we've seen just over the years, over the months, like so much about just like the climate side of all of these companies, like I said, just like being really like shifted to the wayside. It's interesting. And it's clear to me, it feels like just like such an obvious headline grab as well. Yeah. And I think to your point about the climate thing, again, going back to Anthropic, this is a company where a lot of people, not everybody, but a lot of people are at least adjacent to effective altruism, and

the priorities of that set of beliefs don't necessarily line up with what you would consider to be conventional philanthropic beliefs. A lot of people, or maybe not a lot, some number of them aren't worried about climate anymore because they think AI is going to solve it. Some number of them has been reported. They've started sort of smoking again because they think cancer will be a solved problem. There's a lot of assumptions about all the things that are going to be fixed. And if you are assuming that certain things are going to be fixed, you are going to put money, you aren't going to put your public benefit money towards those things. You're going to find other places to put them, no matter what the current state of urgency is on anything. Last week, an official in the Louisiana Secretary of State's office was going through the mail when they opened a letter and a mysterious white powder fell out. The office was evacuated. The employee was rushed to the emergency room. They were thankfully not injured

and subsequent tests showed that the substance was not harmful. By Wednesday, the office was back open and running. Bit of a scary story, you know, going a couple of weeks into the election. But the issue here was that it wasn't a one off. Over the course of the following days, election offices in more than 31 other states were targeted with similar letters as they prepared for the midterms. Many of those states have made public statements acknowledging the letters. But Wired's David Gilbert, he actually is the person who broke the full extent of how how far this harassment campaign went, he contacted officials in all 50 states and D.C., and our accounting shows the full scale of this campaign for the very first time. It's wild. It's really, really wild. Even if this powder was not detrimental, it's very scary and clearly part of a harassment campaign for election officials leading into one of the most consequential elections in U.S. history. Yeah. Yeah. No, the fact, I mean, great work, David, making so many calls and putting in the work.

It really, so we had 32 states confirmed receipt of a letter like this, and we still have a few who haven't responded yet. So it's still, the number could still go up. And Leah, it's not necessarily, I thought it was not necessarily Democrat or Republican. It's sort of across the board, right? Exactly. The letters also coincided with similar letters that were sent to congressional offices across the country that also targeted both Democratic and Republican lawmakers. Look, I have to say, like hats off to the Postal Service. The vast majority of the letters were intercepted before they reached all of their intended targets. But in a number of states, they weren't. And election offices had to get evacuated. These offices are there in like finals mode right now. This is everything, like the time that it takes to have to handle threats like this. And they're also already handling other threats, like between election denier groups and, you know, rumors of ICE at the polls.

Like these election officials are already underwater. So the idea that there's this additional threat is just wild. The FBI and USPS say that they're investigating, but the FBI has not been clear about whether it has any leads, how many letters it's identified, anything of that nature. Yeah, Leah, I think it's really interesting that you know, like, election officials are dealing with a lot right now. And this is just one more thing to do with. How do you see that, if at all, affecting the election? I mean, are you concerned about not just the letters, but when you take the totality of the things that are that are piling up again, we're two weeks out. How concerned are you that something goes wrong or gets missed or goes right because of the pressure on election officials making it harder to do their job than ever? Oh, my God. I mean, like that's that's the fear. If you listening to this podcast and you feel comfortable going out to vote go vote But there is a different there a different undercurrent right now And that what we hearing from NGOs local activists election officials which is

like, it's, it's very hard to pitch the get out the vote platform when there have been so many threats. All to say like, this is right now, you know, DHS officials have recently said they don't plan on sending immigration officers and masks to patrol the polls. But everyone's still scared because Trump has previously said in the past that that's a possibility. Republicans have previously said in the past that's a possibility. And so there's just there's so much conflicting statements. It's very tense. It's very tense. It's something that Wired's tracking closely. The whole Wired politics team is very ready to keep to keep an eye on how all of this unfolds. Do we have any sense of the motivation of the people who are sending these white powder letters? I ask partly because on Sunday, Utah, Lieutenant Governor Deirdre Henderson posted an image of an intercepted letter to Fred's top left-hand corner of the letter says that DSA sent it, the Democratic Socialists of America, with the New York zip code. DSA has denied any involvement. I am not saying, I think, to be clear.

I don't think it was DSA, just to be very, very clear. But it does seem like an attempt to potentially pin it on DSA. Have we seen anything beyond Utah with that? Have we seen any other attempts to use this or leverage this? Or is that just sort of an isolated thing and really who knows? It's so tough to say. So we haven't seen that like on a larger scale. But, you know, for all that the right loves to talk about false flag operations, this is a literal false flag. and to me is just so clearly a way to encourage more splits in an already very divided country and the idea like, oh, no, it's the leftists. They're trying to stop the election. See, we've been calling fraud this whole time. Oh, no, it was the right way. Like, there's so many different ways to take this, and at the end of the day, it's about, you know, disunity, which is not new for American elections.

I know no one likes to talk about Russian involvement or foreign involvement from elections past, but it's not that kind of involvement, that kind of disinformation, that kind of harassment that rarely had to do with very specific motions like sending ice to the polls. It had to do with encouraging people to hate each other and pretending that there was a bigger divide than there was on a variety of issues. And so I think that we're seeing this play out again. And of course we are, specifically with these letters and other examples of voter intimidation that are really concerning. Coming up after the break, we're sharing our Wired Tired picks for the week. Stay with us. AI tools can write code, access files, connect to the Internet and execute commands at a speed no human can match. That productivity is powerful, but it also means one bad instruction or compromised tool can quickly become a security incident.

ThreatLocker helps organizations use AI without losing control. Put zero-trust guardrails around tools like ClaudeCode and control exactly what they can execute, access, and connect to. Set clear boundaries around the applications, files, systems, and online destinations your AI tools are permitted to use. Because approving an AI tool should not mean giving it unrestricted access to your environment. Control what runs. Control what it can do. Control what it connects to. Learn how ThreatLocker can help you safely embrace AI at ThreatLocker.com slash Wired. That's T-H-R-E-A-T-L-O-C-K-E-R dot com slash Wired. It is time for our Wired Tired segment. Whatever is new and cool is wired, and whatever passe thing we're over is tired. Brian, tell me yours. Leah, you will probably disagree with this, but only because I know you enjoy traveling to other parts of the world.

You enjoy living in other parts of the world. You've done it your whole life. Sure. But I will say tired is moving to another country, say in Europe, expecting things to be dramatically better than they were in the United States in some ways. I say this because we ran a great story this week from a writer named Sarah Manavis. I hope I am pronouncing that correctly, Sarah. Apologies if not. interviewing a bunch of expats who fled America because of Trump and found themselves. They found that Europe was not the idyllic countryside perfect world that they thought it would be. Europe's great. I'm not knocking Europe. I'm not knocking moving. But it did include colorful examples, which is someone who fled to Poland to avoid a far right authoritarian government. So I guess I would say Tired more specifically would be do your research before you move to another country. Do your research, folks. Okay, what's Wired? What's your Wired? Wired, I'm going to say reviewed the iPhone Duo this week.

The Duo is not my Wired, but Julian's wallpaper for the Duo, which is an adorable Snoopy on a bright yellow background. It made my day. I have looked at it like 10 times today. Every time I'm feeling down, I just look at this picture of Julian's wallpaper, and it makes me feel better. So I'm going to say that is Wired. I love that. That's pretty good. I'm going to have to go check that out. Okay. My Wired of this week is the only way that I have been avoiding election doom in 100% of my life. It's focusing on Halloween, which has been so fun. This week, I am revisiting some old favorites, a.k.a. Cher's cult classic. Also, shout out to Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer, The Witches of Eastwick. Highly recommend. Get some Hocus Pocus in there. There's just, you know, a lot of really, really good forms of media to read as it. My daughter put on, this is Halloween from The Nightmare Before Christmas. This morning before school really got everybody moving.

So cute. So cute. There's candy everywhere. Like, this is really, this is helping me out right now. I'm deeply, deeply loving it. My tired is a real life spooky tale. Our security team at Wired.com has been doing an unbelievable job tracking some very serious vulnerabilities across the Internet. They have a couple of big scoops, specifically the PHP Foundation revealed to serious vulnerabilities that could impact millions of websites. There's been just, I don't know, I'm, what am I, but a politics and science person. But it just feels like there has been a proliferation of very scary stories recently about vulnerabilities and hacking. And the Internet is no longer ours. Was it ever? So really, go check out the security section so you can have a real-life Halloween experience. And Leah, in fairness, you're always talking about PHP. I am always talking about PHP. You won't set up about it.

So this is your moment in a lot of ways. Welcome. That's our show for today. This episode was produced by Adriana Tapia. Mixed by Pran Bandy. Fact-checking by Matt Giles. Our executive producer is Kate Osborne. Our global editorial director is Katie Drummond. AI can make businesses faster. It can also make mistakes, expose data, and execute the wrong instructions faster. ThreatLocker helps organizations set boundaries AI cannot ignore by controlling what applications can run, what they can reach, and how they interact with sensitive resources. Innovation needs more than good intentions. It needs limits. Control AI with zero trust at ThreatLocker.com slash Wired. That's T-H-R-E-A-T-L-O-C-K-E-R dot com slash Wired.