Why Amazon Dropped Its OpenAI Movie, Data Center Workers Fight Back, and Meta Leaks Employee Data

Leah Feiger: And later in the show, we’ll get an update on how the talks between Anthropic and the government seem to be improving now that CEO Dario Amodei isn’t in the room.

Zoë Schiffer: OK guys, I am so excited to talk about the business with this movie Artificial, which was suddenly dropped by Amazon’s MGM Studios. So to get everyone up to speed, Artificial is a film by the director of Call Me by Your Name and Challengers, two great movies if I do say so. And it’s a biographical drama about OpenAI and specifically The Blip, which was this moment in November 2023 when Sam Altman was abruptly fired by his board of directors and then swiftly rehired after basically the whole company revolted. I genuinely cannot believe they made an entire movie about this.

Brian Barrett: Yeah.

Zoë Schiffer: It’s been described as The Social Network, but for the AI Age. The movie features a star-studded cast with Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman and Monica Barbaro as the former OpenAI CTO, Mira Murati. The movie was like mid-budget. I think they spent $40 million on production, but it was basically almost done when Amazon announced that they were dropping the film, saying, “It would be better served if it were released by another studio.” The decision has been drawing criticism because it’s seen as Amazon basically doing a solid for Sam Altman, who the movie portrays pretty badly. I have to know what you guys think.

Leah Feiger: I have so many thoughts immediately. One, Andrew Garfield, we knew that. We knew it was always going to be him. Playing whiny tech bros is absolutely in his wheelhouse.

Zoë Schiffer: He famously played the Facebook cofounder who was kind of pushed out by Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network.

Brian Barrett: I think too, there’s some context here too, which is that Amazon has $50 billion invested in OpenAI, right? So in terms of like, when they say the movie will be better served by another studio, I think what they really mean is the studio will be better served by another movie, right? This is really like—

Leah Feiger: For sure.

Brian Barrett: —arm’s length at this. What really strikes me about it is something that we’ve known is coming and has been happening, but the extent to which the film industry and the tech industry are intertwined right now. Amazon owns MGM. Paramount is being acquired by the Ellison family, Larry Ellison, obviously the founder of Oracle. So all these tech billionaires are now sort of totally intertwined with the movie industry, which is really going to determine what movies get made and what don’t. And this is a really glaring example of that.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I mean, I can speak firsthand that there were many Twitter/Elon Musk film project that were in talks, but very difficult to get that to the screen for obvious reasons. I do think the film was, everything we heard was that it was going to be unflattering for Sam Altman. In fact, The Blip is pretty unflattering for Sam Altman because the reason that a lot of Sam Altman’s executives turned on him and orchestrated what has been called a coup was that they perceived him to be duplicitous, to lie, to tell different people different things based on what he thought they wanted to hear. And in the film, it really seems like Ilya Sutskever, who is the former chief scientist of OpenAI, really comes off as the hero. He’s gone on to found another company that’s really focused on safe artificial intelligence. And so it doesn’t entirely surprise me that this was going to be a complicated project for Amazon to champion. In addition to the investment that you just talked about, Brian, they’ve also struck a $38 billion compute deal somewhat recently.

Brian Barrett: And Sam Altman was a guest at Jeff Bezos’ wedding last year. It’s personal, it’s financial, it’s all of these things.

Zoë Schiffer: Right.

Brian Barrett: And you sort of hope, like the idealized version of this, right, is that they would treat it the same way as they maybe treat the media industry when you have these billionaires taking over at these companies where it’s sort of a hands-off, you do what you do. I trust the art. I’m doing this because I believe in it. That’s not the case. It’s less and less the case in the media industry as well. Jeff Bezos obviously has made some pretty big changes at The Washington Post, there’s sort of this exertion of influence that, in an ideal world, would not be happening. Powerful interests have owned Hollywood companies for a long time, but this is sort of just such an overt case.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. And I think that for OpenAI, they’re really sensitive right now to public opinion. They feel like, and they’re not the only ones, Anthropic feels this way too, that AI is increasingly unpopular. There’s already been some talks about Sam Altman being ousted again before OpenAI goes public as soon as this year, probably next year. And so I think that while you might say, “Oh, they can just brush this off. They’re focused on other things. They’re used to bad media articles and perhaps negative portrayals.” I think that they’re increasingly trying to control the message.

Brian Barrett: And also the medium, right? I think the other deal that happened this week that drew a lot of eyebrows was Google DeepMind announcing a $75 million investment in A24, beloved indie darling, to create AI tools. Leah, I know you feel strongly and sadly about this.

Leah Feiger: Yeah. But the thing is I kind of hate A24.

Brian Barrett: Oh.

Leah Feiger: It’s already so programmatic anyway. I’m like, ah, yes, another film in this exact sepia tone that has these exact actors playing these exact roles. The minute that I saw that it was A24 getting into bed with Google DeepMind, I was like, “Perfect. This was already an algorithm waiting to happen. Of course they’re going to give it to the bots.”

Zoë Schiffer: Well, this content is made for me. I’m a huge fan of A24. However, I’ve talked to a lot of people in Hollywood about this because there have been all of these deals, and yet we’ve seen OpenAI and Anthropic, like these big AI labs kind of hint that we will be able to produce films with AI really soon. And then you actually see an AI-generated film and you’re like, certainly not. But what I am hearing is that AI is being used more and more for very specific purposes. It’s things like storyboarding. And I believe that in the press release, Google DeepMind and A24 kind of mentioned that as a possible use case. It’s things like rotoscoping, basically very labor-intensive, specific areas of the film development process that used to take a lot of human labor and were really expensive and you can genuinely automate. Those are, as far as some people think, really good use cases for AI. And I think we will start to see more and more shots, like specific shots on the big screen that are AI-generated. I think I would be very surprised if we see a feature-length film on the big screen that’s AI-generated start to finish and is anything other than a one-off gimmick. There’s an ick factor in realizing that something you engaged with was AI-generated and you didn’t know—and I actually think this is important not to dismiss. And then there’s the, like, can it actually create something that is quality enough to appear in that type of context?

Brian Barrett: I do think too, one thing that, this gets to your point earlier, Zoë, that when people see there’s a deal for $75 million, you assume that it’s to train AI. You assume that it’s going to be, oh, now Google’s going to absorb all of A24 stuff into the borg and like—but it’s not that. So it’s interesting that it’s still controversial obviously, but that it is really for those, like trying to find those purpose-built tools to support the creation of non-AI film, which gets lost and is, yeah.

Zoë Schiffer: You need a human. I think there was fear that Google would be training its models on the A24 catalog and that’s specifically not part of the deal. I think probably Google wanted access to that IP, if I had to guess, but it would be a really bad brand move for A24 to give them that access.

Brian Barrett: We’ve talked about how everything’s connected—file one more connection under this: A24 has Thrive Capital as one of its investors. That is a venture capital firm owned by Josh Kushner, brother of Jared Kushner. Thrive has OpenAI as a major investment, holds a major stake in SpaceX, Warner Brothers about to be owned by the Ellison family—just a lot going on in terms of everybody owned by anybody related to everybody.

Leah Feiger: Film industry trying to cozy up to AI. There are other people that hate it for all sorts of different reasons too. Beyond creativity concerns, there is an ongoing pattern that we’ve been keeping an eye on, the sustained and increasing backlash against data centers across the country. Today, more than 40 percent of homes in the US are within 5 miles of an operating data center, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. And the construction boom just keeps going as the big AI companies devote billions and billions of dollars towards infrastructure to keep up with the demand. WIRED has reported about residents pushing back against data center construction in their communities for everything that it brings, from higher electricity bills to water scarcity, noise, you name it. So workers that are in theory the ones implementing these projects are actually pushing back too in any way they can. Have you guys been following this?

Brian Barrett: Yeah, it’s been interesting to see this evolution. I think we’ve talked a lot about communities pushing back and that remains an important story, but we’ve had a couple of stories on WIRED and there’ve been stories elsewhere about people who are directly involved. Caroline Haskins, a WIRED staff writer, had a great look at how electricians—right?—electricians are crucial to building data centers. Some of them are now saying, “Wait a minute, does this make you a sellout? Does working on a data center mean that you are kind of betraying broader principles, not just electrician principles, just human principles?”

Zoë Schiffer: You’re missing the best part of that story, which was when the electrician said that it’s really hard to date once he tells people that he’s an electrician who works on data centers.

Brian Barrett: It’s like Cybertrucks. It’s like owning a Cybertruck.

Zoë Schiffer: It really did remind me of that.

Brian Barrett: Working on a data center is the new owning a Cybertruck.

Zoë Schiffer: The difficult thing about this, I think, I mean, so yeah. People don’t want to live near data centers. They spike your energy bills, they’re loud and bright, and take all sorts of resources. I think that makes a lot of sense. In terms of countrywide economic initiatives, data centers in some ways feel like all we have. Am I going to get skewered for saying that? I’m just like, this is like the big thing, AI is the big thing that America is betting on, and I think it’s complicated to try and slow that down or roll that back rather than try and push for them to be less horrible to live near.

Brian Barrett: But I think here’s the thing. I agree. The building of data centers and investment in AI is the US economy at this point. And when that goes away—

Zoë Schiffer: Right.

Brian Barrett: It’s going to be really, really painful. I think a lot of the pushback though, is that there’s not really much direct economic benefit for you locally if a data center comes. Usually when you have like, oh, they’re bringing a railroad into town, at least you get added commerce from the railroad, right?

Zoë Schiffer: Right.

Brian Barrett: This is what happened.

Zoë Schiffer: Oh, my God.

Brian Barrett: I’m old enough.

Zoë Schiffer: This is the one railroad example that I’ll accept.

Brian Barrett: Thank you. Yes, good. I’ve made it. So I think that’s part of it. I think at the same time, you’ve got people inside these companies who are leading the charge. So it’s not just people directly affected. It’s people who actually stand to benefit from this stuff, both the electricians, people inside Amazon. For example, some Amazon employees recently urged the Seattle City Council to regulate data centers. So even people with presumably a financial interest in this stuff are pushing back. I get what you’re saying, Zoë, but I think there is a certain—it makes sense to me that people are saying, “Wait, hold up,” because it’s not an economy that everybody’s able to participate in.

Zoë Schiffer: No, totally. I want to be clear. I completely understand the pushback. If one of these were built in my neighborhood, I would be pushing back. I think it’s totally legitimate not to want to live near them. I just think the situation is complicated when so much of our economy now hinges on this industry. It’s not a reason not to regulate, but I think it’s going to be very complicated to roll it back. I’ve also been curious, and Leah, I’m curious on your perspective on this, just to see which politicians have really—I was kind of struck that Bernie Sanders has become a really vocal opponent to data centers.

Leah Feiger: Yeah. Senator Bernie Sanders and representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, AOC, they introduced the Data Center Moratorium Act, which would halt the construction of new AI data centers until there were actual national safeguards. This sounds, in so many ways, like a very baked-for-left-wing issue, but shockingly, this is pretty bipartisan. There are folks from all sides of the aisle getting involved because their constituents are reaching out and going, “What are you doing in my name? What are you doing in my backyard? How is this benefiting me? How is this hurting me?” So I think the thing that I’ve been most shocked by is the bipartisanship of this.

Zoë Schiffer: It’s interesting because I feel like, and this is purely my speculation, but just based on how OpenAI talked about data centers, really came out in front during the first day of the Trump administration, kind of championing big data center build-out projects. I was like, I’m reading Chris Lehane, the company’s chief global affairs officer, previously very high up at Airbnb and a political fixer before that as like this was something that he and OpenAI might’ve thought was going to be really beneficial for the company. It was like an America-first, build, baby, build kind of message.

Leah Feiger: We’re giving jobs to everyone.

Zoë Schiffer: They just misread the moment. They did not realize how toxic this issue was going to be. And now it’s very hard to change their stance when they’ve been releasing press releases every time there was a new data center. Now it’s like, “Uh-oh, we got to keep it quiet because people really don’t like this.”

Brian Barrett: And to your point, they can’t roll it back either way, until you can put data centers in space, because they need the compute.

Zoë Schiffer: Which by the way, is going to be really difficult to do.

Brian Barrett: If not impossible. Zoë, is there any chance that the sort of internal dissent, right, electricians saying, “I don’t think so.” Workers inside of companies saying, “Hey, we don’t like data centers either.” Any chance that that changes anything at all in terms of the trajectory for these build-outs, for these companies, for the spending?

Zoë Schiffer: I would be very surprised. I don’t want to say absolutely not because we have seen examples where famously Google workers all came together, pushed back on Project Maven, some of the censored search projects for China and what have you, and actually got those launches paused.

Brian Barrett: Just real quick, Project Maven was working with the Pentagon basically, right, using Google Tech for the DOD?

Zoë Schiffer: Exactly, exactly. So yeah, it’s happened before. It could happen again. What I would say is two things. One, the pushback we’ve seen from the hourly workers has been minimal when you look at the entire workforce. They are bringing in thousands of people. I’ve heard that they’re paying much higher rates than people typically get on these jobs. And so I think for an industry that has historically needed a lot of work, I think there will be people who are willing to work on these projects and then we’ll hear little pockets of dissent and pushback, which again is newsworthy, and relevant, and it’s not no one, but I still think they’re able to hire thousands and thousands of people. I would also say that on the corporate level, while we are starting to see more pushback, more vocal opposition from corporate workers in terms of what their companies are doing, it’s still at a far lower level than it was around 2018.

Brian Barrett: Especially when the job market is radically different now for these engineers. And I think a few years ago there was a turning point too where Google fired a bunch of people for protesting, whereas before they had sort of allowed it, at least sort of let it happen. I will say there is one thing that will get management to listen to employees and that is a colossal screw-up, which we saw at Meta recently. We’ve talked before about how Meta installed software on employee devices to track every keystroke, all the screen activity, basically full surveillance on its employees to help train AI. This week, WIRED broke the news that the company apparently left potentially sensitive information from those sessions exposed and accessible to anyone inside Meta. So if you’re a Meta employee, everything you did on your screen could be viewed by any of your coworkers. Can you imagine?

Zoë Schiffer: No, and I feel like we have to just back up a little further even and lay this out for people. So Mark Zuckerberg feels like he is behind in the AI race. He invests billions of dollars in building up this new AI lab, spending so much money on specific talent, giving them so many resources to catch up and build frontier models. Then the company says, “We’re spending so much on the AI buildout that we actually have to lay off a whole bunch of you, 10 percent of the workforce.” Then they say—

Brian Barrett: 8,000 people.

Zoë Schiffer: Right, 8,000 people. Then they say, “By the way, you’re going to have surveillance tech installed in your laptop to track your keystrokes, whether you like it or not, to train the models that that fancy AI lab that just was connected to all these layoffs are trying to build. And then, oh, by the way, we left all of that data exposed accidentally.”

Brian Barrett: But we will be holding a hackathon in a few months to increase morale. The one thing that came out of this that is maybe a silver lining or a good thing is that Meta did announce that they are pausing the data gathering program while they investigate what exactly happened here, but it’s a pause. It’s a pause.

Zoë Schiffer: They did say pause. Then we updated that story later that very night and they made it very—they had not said anything company-wide about the leak. We had been hearing about it from a bunch of different sources. They were still keeping it pretty locked down. Then late at night, we finally got the message that they had sent out and they very much said, “We’re going to evaluate what happened here, make sure it doesn’t happen again before we relaunched the tools,” was the message.

Brian Barrett: The guy who’s been the face of a lot of those apologies is Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, known as Boz, and it sort of burns a little bit extra because before this happened, before this internal leak happened, people had asked him straight up, “Isn’t this potentially dangerous from a privacy perspective?” And he told employees, “Actually, it’s tightly controlled and we use the same protection standards, and store systems, and access controls as other sensitive datasets,” which makes you worry about the other sensitive datasets—

Zoë Schiffer: Truly.

Brian Barrett: that Meta is sitting on.

Zoë Schiffer: Completely. I’m excited for the feature that we assign that’s titled Boz and his Metamates. I feel like Brian, I don’t know, it just seems like a story that you would say yes to.

Brian Barrett: It’s right. Can’t stress enough that Metamates is what people call each other inside of Meta. Do you guys want to hear a leaked audio of Mark Zuckerberg discussing the training initiative with employees last month and why he thought it was essential?

Leah Feiger: Always.

Zoë Schiffer: Absolutely.

Mark Zuckerberg, archival audio: We’re in a phase where basically the AI models learn from watching really smart people do things. In general, the average intelligence of the people who are at this company is significantly higher than the average set of people that you can get to do tasks. So if we’re trying to teach the models coding, for example, then having people internally build tools or solve tasks that help teach the model how to code, we think is going to dramatically increase our model’s coding ability faster than what others in the industry have the capability to do who don’t have thousands and thousands of extremely strong engineers at their company.

Zoë Schiffer: You’re actually so good at taking meeting notes, that you’re just, you’re great at it. So we had to give you that job.

Brian Barrett: You all are going to be so good at replacing yourselves with AI, that we’re going to let you do that even faster.

Leah Feiger: Can we talk about another AI company, you guys?

Zoë Schiffer: Oh my gosh, Leah.

Leah Feiger: Your dream, Zoë, you’re dreaming—

Zoë Schiffer: You go away—

Leah Feiger: Of me saying that.

Zoë Schiffer: For a little bit of time and you’re ready to just talk AI all of the time.

Brian Barrett: One of us. One of us.

Leah Feiger: Well, it has to do with Anthropic and the US government. As we know, Anthropic has had a bit of a dust-up with the Trump administration over their most advanced models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, after the National Security Agency affirmed that there were ways to jailbreak and disable the security guardrails in these models. Since then, both sides have been trying to find a way forward. Sometimes there has appeared to be movement, other times less so. But recently, WIRED’s Hugo Lowell reported for his newsletter Inner Loop that the administration has had multiple calls with Anthropic in recent days, appears to be making some moves, some encouraging moves, but it’s mainly all due to the fact that they don’t have to interact with the company’s CEO anymore, Dario Amodei. This quote is going to stay with me forever, you guys, because the administration is very excited that Tom Brown, Anthropic’s cofounder and Anthropic’s public policy chief, Sarah Heck, have been leading the outreach. This is the quote about this that we have from an official. I’m never going to get over it. “Tom Brown is not being a weirdo like Dario and can actually engage.”

Zoë Schiffer: Incredible. I mean, no one was ever saying that Dario wasn’t very weird. I mean, that man is an oddball.

Brian Barrett: I love this quote for us. I feel so bad for him.

Leah Feiger: I feel so bad for him, but it was also just this incredible like, what’s changed here. No, no, it’s not like the technical issues. It’s the who the interactions are with—

Zoë Schiffer: Right.

Leah Feiger: Which is, I don’t know, perhaps the Trump administration in a nutshell. These talks have been happening at the high level, working-group level, technical staff.

Zoë Schiffer: I feel like we need to lay out those stakes really quick for people who haven’t been following every twist and turn of this saga, which, wow, your brain must be so healthy and I’m jealous, but …

Brian Barrett: It must be nice. Yeah.

Zoë Schiffer: That must be nice. The US government, after the NSA basically alleged that there were ways to jailbreak the models, implemented export controls on those models and basically said that it was not OK for Anthropic to allow foreign nationals to access the model. There is no technical way for Anthropic to do that. And so what they had to do was roll back access to both of those models for everyone. It’s a really big deal for the company. And so these talks have basically been trying to hash out from Anthropic side, what do we need to do to get those models back on the market? And from the US government side, what do we need from Anthropic to feel comfortable that these models can launch and they won’t be a huge cybersecurity nightmare?

Brian Barrett: Well, especially it seems as though also like the Trump administration from our understanding is that they’re asking for something that’s basically not possible. They’re asking for a model that you cannot jailbreak, which is just not a thing. The nature of these models, the best you can do, which Anthropic has said, “Hey, we can do this,” is to sort of make it nearly impossible to do a universal jailbreak where you can get it to do anything you want it to do. But you can see how for a conversation, especially like this, having someone who can talk about these issues on a nontechnical level and on a political level and someone who’s maybe able to suppress their highfalutin ideas about AI, you can see how it really matters in situations like this and is going to continue to matter for all of these companies. They’re all going to have to go in front of the White House at some point and make a case for why this super powerful model should be released.

Zoë Schiffer: You really need someone who can get through an explanation without saying Fermi’s paradox, orthogonal. They got to be able to speak the English language.

Leah Feiger: So is that what this is going to come down to? Are national security concerns alleviated by someone that actually listened to their PR person for longer than three minutes about how to talk in public?

Brian Barrett: I mean, yes. I’ll go even further. If they had listened to their PR person two months ago, or if their PR person had taken a different tack, I think we wouldn’t be here in the first place.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I mean, but this is the interesting thing, because Anthropic has spent so much time publicly saying, “AI is really dangerous. AI could end humanity. Our models are so scary, and so good at cybersecurity, and hacking, that we can’t release them publicly.” And so I do feel like they have, and Dario Amodei in particular has put himself and the company in this very specific position, actually also saying that we need a lot of government regulation. When they’re saying all those things and they don’t have strong relationships with the Pentagon, they are walking a very, very fine line. It is not that long ago that there was this big falling out because Anthropic was trying to put a line in the sand and say, “You can’t use our models for any type of military action that you want. You can’t create autonomous weapons with them,” or what have you. And the Pentagon was saying, “You don’t get to decide what we do with these models. This is American AI and we want to do what we want to do.”

Brian Barrett: Coming up after the break, we’ll share our WIRED/TIRED picks for the week. Stay with us.

Zoë Schiffer: It’s time for our WIRED/TIRED segment. You know the drill, whatever is new and cool is WIRED, whatever passé thing we’re over is TIRED.

Leah Feiger: OK. I’m going to start on a positive. My WIRED is Caroline Calloway. She is—

Brian Barrett: Wow.

Leah Feiger: Back on our feeds, back on our feeds, people, just going through a terrible breakup and posting through it.

Brian Barrett: Give people two sentences on Caroline Calloway, because I have been online too much for the last decade, but not everyone has been. So give them a little bit of who this is and why it’s so exciting.

Leah Feiger: Caroline Calloway is like an erstwhile grifter now downtown Dime Square gal. I encourage you, if you don’t know who this woman is, to jump down the rabbit hole. Very, very fun. Couldn’t recommend more.

Zoë Schiffer: So she’s WIRED.

Leah Feiger: Yeah, she’s my WIRED and my TIRED is Feed Me’s Emily Sundberg.

Brian Barrett: Leah’s just going for it.

Zoë Schiffer: We’re torching.

Brian Barrett: Going for it.

Leah Feiger: We’re torching. Zoë has known I’ve had inklings of this for a while. Emily Sundberg’s Substack used to be one of my favorites. I think that she was doing something very, very cool. She was making business news, and tech news, and cultural news. Recently, in the last couple weeks, months, a lot of people have also really taken note of Emily Sundberg. She has gotten a lot of press and collaborations, and I’m trying really hard to phrase this correctly and kindly anyway, but her recent newsletter from this week where she interviews Mark Zuckerberg from Meta about his style and time at Harvard made me want to die. So TIRED, Emily Sundberg. I’m so sorry. I think you could pull it back out. I really do, but everything you write is embarrassing now and I’m over it.

Zoë Schiffer: OK. That’s a Leah-specific opinion, Emily. I still love your newsletter.

Brian Barrett: Leah does not necessarily speak for Uncanny Valley as a whole.

Zoë Schiffer: No, we’re very divided actually. We’ve realized during the course of this pod. All right, Brian, let’s go to—

Brian Barrett: No, I can’t follow that.

Zoë Schiffer: I hope you have the most tepid WIRED/TIRED ever.

Brian Barrett: I can’t follow that. No. WIRED is making friends and TIRED is keeping—no, mine is boring compared to that, but I’ll say it anyway. Leah, you should have gone second. You should have insisted. My WIRED is cheap EV trucks. Cheap EV trucks. There I said it. Don’t look at me like that. The Slate is a new EV truck that’s been in the works for a while. It’s had a lot of hype behind it, but they’re going to sell it for $25,000, which is still a good chunk of change. But the average new car price in the US, does anyone know what it is? $50,000 is the average new car price. So they’re coming in with an electric truck. It’s all gray. It’s very boring. It is no frills, but it’s $25,000. So it is an accessible electric truck that anyone can buy. And the reason they’re able to do that is because this car has nothing. You have to crank the windows, you have to pay extra for every—it’s like the Spirit Airlines of EVs where you have to pay for—

Zoë Schiffer: Wait, this is TIRED. We don’t want this.

Brian Barrett: No, this is WIRED. I love this. I think it is WIRED, that there is an affordable EV that you can buy and then you can just add, there are over 200 accessories that you can add to this. So if you want other things on this car, you want the car to have a color, for example, or you want automatic windows or whatever, you can add that piece by piece and distinct to each car instead of automatically you walk in and have to pay $50,000 for stuff you may not want or need. I think these days, especially as the government is pulling back incentives for EVs, there’s this big push toward oil. To see something that people can actually buy and actually customize, that actually has decent range, I think is really nice, unexpected. That’s my WIRED. TIRED is whatever the opposite of that is.

Zoë Schiffer: I know when you said Spirit Airlines, I was like, that sounds like a negative. I do really want to get the Rivian as my next car. I’m all in on the electric. Yeah.

Brian Barrett: I’m waiting for the R3, which apparently won’t come out until 2030.

Zoë Schiffer: Oh my gosh. Yes.

Brian Barrett: Hang in there.

Leah Feiger: I just want Subaru. I want a Subaru EV. I’m putting that out into the universe.

Brian Barrett: Yeah.

Leah Feiger: Come through Subaru.

Zoë Schiffer: That’s our show for today. We’ll link to all the stories we spoke 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. It was fact checked by Daniel Roman. Pran Bandi is our New York studio engineer. Marc Leyda is our San Francisco studio engineer. Kimberly Chua is our senior digital production manager. Kate Osborn is our executive producer and Katie Drummond is WIRED’s global editorial director.