Uncanny Valley: Full Episode Recap & Transcript

Episode Overview

This week on WIRED’s Uncanny Valley podcast, hosts Brian Barrett and Zoë Schiffer break down the chaotic ongoing upheaval at Meta, and what the internal meltdown reveals about the company’s all-consuming push to win the global AI race. The pair also unpack a massive new leak exposing the full membership roster of Peter Thiel’s secretive invite-only elite society, dive into disgraced crypto founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s active push for a presidential pardon from the Trump administration, share their takes on SpaceX’s blockbuster acquisition of AI coding startup Cursor, and catch listeners up on tense ongoing negotiations between AI firm Anthropic and the Trump White House.

Articles Featured in This Episode

• Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth Admits the Company’s AI Reorg Was ‘Atrocious’

• ‘Tell Him He’s a Piece of Shit’: Meta’s New AI Unit Is a Total Mess

• Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel’s Secretive ‘Dialog’ Society

• Anthropic Is Still at Odds With the White House Over Claude Fable 5

Connect With the Hosts

Follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett and Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer. Send your questions and feedback to [email protected].

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How to Listen

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Episode Transcript

Note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity; the original automated transcription may contain uncorrected errors.

Brian Barrett: Hey everyone, it’s Brian. Before we jump into the show, I have two quick asks. First, if you’ve been enjoying the podcast, please take 30 seconds to leave us a rating in whatever podcast app you use. It really helps new listeners find us, and we appreciate it more than you know. Second, if you have any questions about tech, privacy, or politics that you want me, Zoë, and Leah to tackle in a future episode, now’s the time to send them our way at [[email protected]]. No question is too big or too small—we want to hear from you, and we’ll answer what we can. Alright, let’s get into the episode.

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

Brian Barrett: I’m Brian Barrett, executive editor.

Zoë Schiffer: Today, we’re kicking off with the total dysfunction roiling Meta’s brand-new AI unit, and how the restructuring has dragged already rock-bottom employee morale even lower.

Brian Barrett: We’ll also break down the recent leak that pulled back the curtain on Dialog, Peter Thiel’s invite-only elite network. The documents leak includes more than 200 names of high-profile figures from government, tech, academia, and more who are members or guests of this secretive group—and we’re also talking about what they actually discuss behind closed doors.

Zoë Schiffer: It’s a big week for controversial figures, so we’re also covering how former crypto founder and convicted felon Sam Bankman-Fried isn’t just lobbying for a pardon from the Trump administration—he’s already plotting a potential comeback after prison.

Brian Barrett: Later in the show, we’ll break down SpaceX’s acquisition of Cursor and catch you up on Anthropic’s ongoing talks with the Trump administration to get their most advanced models back online.

Zoë Schiffer: Brian, we have to start with the absolute chaos going on inside Meta right now, because the company—

Brian Barrett: It’s bad.

Zoë Schiffer: It’s so bad. People are furious. Let me set the scene: Meta has been laser-focused on catching up and winning the AI race. They’ve poured billions into a new AI division, Meta Superintelligence Labs, dumped massive resources into AI infrastructure, and rolled out new models. The rollout has been bumpy from the start, but more recently, the company reshuffled its entire workforce to prioritize AI. During last month’s round of layoffs, roughly 7,000 employees were reassigned to AI-focused teams. One of those teams is Meta’s applied AI engineering unit, which exists to support the work of Superintelligence Labs, the company’s flagship AI effort. And to say the transition has not gone smoothly is a massive understatement.

Brian Barrett: To add more context: that same layoff round cut 8,000 Meta roles entirely, right?

Zoë Schiffer: Exactly—10 percent of the company’s total headcount.

Brian Barrett: And then 7,000 more got reassigned to various AI units, including this applied AI team that employees absolutely hate. One source we talked to even called it “the Gulag.” That’s how bad it is.

Zoë Schiffer: They really did say that.

Brian Barrett: Last week, we got footage from an all-employee meeting for the applied AI unit where one caller interrupted the entire call to say they were being “the company’s bitch.” Then they told the leaders on the call to go write to a top Meta AI executive and “Tell him he's a piece of shit.” We both heard the recording, Zoë.

Zoë Schiffer: We have, multiple times.

Brian Barrett: As much as I appreciated the unfiltered interruption, what I loved even more was the deafening silence that came right after it.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, that was brutal. Two big things stand out here. First, employees are furious because the work they’re being assigned is seen as totally menial. Meta took dozens of engineers who were working on interesting, high-stakes projects, according to their accounts to us, and just moved them to this team where their whole job is to clean up after the AI. If the AI can’t do something, you fix it. It sounds like post-training fine-tuning for specific use cases. Employees told us it’s not that the work is hard—it’s that it’s totally unchallenging. One person said it’s chill, but they feel like they have no purpose anymore. They get random, meaningless tasks and have no autonomy over their work. The second big issue is that employees had no choice about being reassigned to this team.

Brian Barrett: A lot of these people joined Meta because they believed in the original mission of building social platforms that connect billions of people—whether we buy that mission still matters at Meta, that’s why they were there. Now they feel like they’re just there to train the AI machine. And on top of that, Meta recently announced it would monitor employee laptop activity and use that work to train AI models. So if you’re a Meta employee right now, it feels like everything you do is just in service of the AI, not some larger company mission.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, and what makes this even more frustrating is that Meta is actually doing really well as a business right now. They’ve posted near-record breaking quarterly results. But that success isn’t coming from their new AI projects. Don’t get me wrong, Meta’s ad product has AI integrated into it, but the long-standing core parts of the business are what’s actually driving all that profit. So employees are basically saying, “We were doing our jobs great, the company’s making more money than ever, and now you’re forcing us into these new roles that required mass layoffs and are losing the company money anyway.” It’s an incredibly frustrating situation.

Brian Barrett: It’s gotten so bad that top management has had to address it publicly internally. As part of our first round of reporting last week, we found that Mark Zuckerberg himself commented on the unrest, and one of his big ideas to boost morale was… a hackathon. How did that go over with rank-and-file employees, Zoë?

Zoë Schiffer: This was such a big deal that it ended up being a second separate scoop for WIRED, it was its own whole saga. Employees immediately pounced on the idea in internal comments, ratioing anyone who said anything positive about the hackathon. They said, “We don’t have a hackathon culture anymore. I don’t have time for this. I’m already stressed about my actual job, and you want me to mess around with side projects? No thanks.” People were furious.

Brian Barrett: It’s clear how far Meta has drifted from the days when Zuckerberg was the hacker-in-chief. Management either doesn’t realize how much things have changed, or they don’t care. They’re already cutting headcount, betting big on AI that they hope will replace a lot of these roles down the line anyway. But moving on, Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth, a longtime top Meta executive, did acknowledge that the communication around the restructuring was “atrocious.” But the fixes he proposed also totally missed the mark for employees. Things like capping managers at 20 direct reports each—that’s still a ton, limiting how many times employees can switch managers during the restructuring, and my personal favorite: “improving the micro kitchens” aka better office snacks.

Zoë Schiffer: Honestly, I’ve seen how much tech employees care about office snacks, so maybe that moves the needle a little? But most employees were like, this isn’t the problem. We’re worried about our jobs and the future of this company, you’re completely missing the point. This whole saga really drove home how out of touch Meta’s leadership is with regular employees. When Boz, Zuckerberg, and CPO Chris Cox talk about AI, they’re genuinely excited about this moment. They’re like, “All hands on deck, we’re restructuring, we had to lay some people off, but the rest of you get to change the world with this technology, let’s go.” And employees are over here like, “I’m completely burnt out. I have no autonomy, no say in what happens to my career, I don’t find this exciting. It feels like you’re making me train the AI that’s going to replace me one day.” There’s just a massive disconnect. Meta says that’s not what’s happening, but that’s how it feels from the inside.

Brian Barrett: Even if the leadership messaging is all about changing the world and being on the edge of a breakthrough, the reality is that Meta is still far behind the competition. All this big, disruptive restructuring is just a scramble to catch up to OpenAI and Anthropic.

Zoë Schiffer: They haven’t had that big breakthrough yet, that’s the key thing. They’ve had some small positive signs, but the rollout of their latest model, Muse Spark, has been delayed and bumpy. None of the AI tools they’ve added to Instagram or other core apps have really taken off with users. Early data shows users aren’t flocking to them, they don’t love them so far. It’s a huge open question right now. Zuckerberg has spent billions, poached top researchers like Alex Wang, poured money into this effort, and we still haven’t seen the payoff. All eyes are on Meta for the next few months to see what comes of it.

Brian Barrett: This reminds me a lot of the Reality Labs metaverse bet a few years back, which never panned out and never will. This is a little different, because other companies have already proven there’s real money to be made in generative AI. That makes this position more uncomfortable for Meta, honestly. With the metaverse, they were out there on their own doing something no one else believed in. Here, they’re in a race they’re currently losing.

Oh, one quick thing I have to mention for anyone who doesn’t know: Meta employees call each other Metamates.

Zoë Schiffer: That is such a critical detail, thank you for bringing that up.

Brian Barrett: You’re welcome. Now you know, and your life is better for it.

Zoë Schiffer: It doesn’t explain everything, but it explains a lot, honestly.

Brian Barrett: Fair. The Meta meeting recording and internal leaks aren’t the only big leaks we broke this week. We also published a story on internal records for Dialog, an exclusive invite-only society co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel back in 2006. For 20 years, the group has refused to release its member list, but a directory hidden in the group’s website code was uncovered by a Swiss hacktivist, and we independently verified it. Now we know who’s involved, and it’s exactly the mix of elites you’d expect, but seeing all of them in one place is still pretty wild. We have US officials, foreign government leaders, Silicon Valley CEOs, all coming together for off-the-record annual retreats to talk about everything from policy to whatever else. The 2026 upcoming retreat guest list includes more than 200 powerful people: sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the PayPal Mafia, a former Middle East intelligence chief, a sitting US ambassador, you name it. Zoë, had you ever heard of Dialog before this leak?

Zoë Schiffer: I hadn’t, but it was on the radar for some people. It doesn’t surprise me at all that Peter Thiel would have a secret society for powerful people. Some of the session names for the 2026 retreat are so perfect, they’re hilarious.

Brian Barrett: They sound exactly like what you’d make up if you were parodying a secret elite society.

Zoë Schiffer: Exactly! We’ve got sessions called “Does Money Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating World War III,” and then… “How’s Your Sex Life?” Which leads me to the most confusing part of this whole thing: Dialog has a whole dating component?

Brian Barrett: Yeah, apparently. Attendees can opt in to matchmaking, you list your marital status and whether you’re single and looking to meet people. Look, I think smart, powerful people deserve love too, but it’s such a small group, it feels like the dating pool is way too small to make that a core feature. But maybe that’s just me.

Zoë Schiffer: I was stuck on all these little weird details. I was like, half of these guys are in open relationships anyway, why do we need to list marital status? But who knows, maybe it makes sense to someone.

Brian Barrett: The leak also shows that they ask every attendee to fill out a form with their prediction for the future. I was curious what a room full of the most powerful people in the world would predict, and it’s… exactly what you’d expect.

Zoë Schiffer: I had this naive little hope that their predictions would be way smarter than anything me or you could come up with. Were they?

Brian Barrett: No. Zoë, we could absolutely be intellectual elites. That’s the punchline. We had predictions of mass AI-driven labor displacement, a political shift back toward unions and social safety net programs, some people predicted an AI winter, domestic terrorism targeting data centers, criminal defendants choosing AI lawyers over public defenders. It’s all just the same lukewarm takes on AI that everyone has been tossing around since ChatGPT blew up. None of it is wrong, it’s just nothing revolutionary.

Zoë Schiffer: So if you’re wondering if all the rich powerful people hang out together to talk about money and influence, the answer is… yeah, that seems to check out.

Brian Barrett: It’s not that surprising that powerful people talk to each other—many of these people network outside Dialog anyway. But why does this secret mix of elites make people so uncomfortable?

Zoë Schiffer: Good question. There have always been these kinds of retreats for powerful politicians and business leaders, but over the past two years, we’ve seen a real shift in where power lies. Tech titans aren’t just powerful in Silicon Valley anymore—they’re major players in US national politics and even global politics. This leak just makes that network of power explicit, that’s why it’s getting so much attention.

Alright, moving on to another controversial figure in the news this week: have you thought much about Sam Bankman-Fried, convicted crypto fraudster, lately?

Brian Barrett: I’ve tried really hard not to, there hasn’t been a reason to until recently.

Zoë Schiffer: Until now. For anyone who hasn’t followed along: SBF, as everyone calls him, was convicted of orchestrating one of the biggest crypto frauds in history—and that’s saying something. He ran FTX, a major crypto exchange, and also ran the hedge fund Alameda Research. He siphoned billions of dollars in customer funds from FTX over to Alameda without telling anyone, which is very illegal, and used that money for his own bets and investments. He got a 25-year prison sentence after being convicted on multiple fraud charges. So why are we talking about him now?

Zoë Schiffer: Because SBF is actively lobbying the Trump administration for a presidential pardon. He wants the president to wipe out his conviction and let him out of prison early. Rumor has it Trump is planning to pardon around 250 people to mark America’s 250th birthday this July, and SBF wants a spot on that list.

Brian Barrett: That’s on top of the hundreds of January 6 rioters he’s already pardoned, for what it’s worth. Lots of pardons going around right now.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, this is a new batch. I’d be really surprised if SBF gets a pardon. Trump always manages to surprise people, but a lot of powerful people are very opposed to letting SBF out—he defrauded a lot of them, and they’re still furious about it.

Brian Barrett: And he’s actively campaigning for it, too. He did an interview from prison with Fox News where he openly hinted he wants a pardon:

[Archived Audio: Sam Bankman-Fried: It’d be obviously ultimately up to the president, not up to me. Reporter: Now, have you had any conversations with the White House or anyone connected to the president at all? Sam Bankman-Fried: I haven’t myself. Reporter: But have, say, your parents or anyone that you've been in contact with at all? Sam Bankman-Fried: Can’t speak for them. Reporter: I assume that you would want a pardon from the White House. Sam Bankman-Fried: Absolutely.]

Zoë Schiffer: I always forget what his voice sounds like.

Brian Barrett: Prison phones don’t do it any favors, that’s for sure. He’s officially filed his pardon application with the Justice