February 6, 2026 • 30 mins
Oz is at the Web Summit in Qatar this week, and he’s taking you with him. This episode was recorded live on stage with Wired’s global editorial director Katie Drummond. Katie and Oz talk about what it’s like to cover this moment, from DOGE and tech titans in the White House to AI’s rapid ubiquity. Katie also shares why Americans need to wake up to what is happening outside the US to discover the future of technology.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Welcome to tech stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
I'm os Voloscan and this week I've been in Doha,
Cutter attending the Web Summit. I had the opportunity to
have a conversation on stage with Katie Drummond, who is
the Global editorial director of Wired and is wide. They
admired for having made the brand more essential and more
relevant than ever. So instead of the Week in Tech,
(00:37):
I wanted to share my conversation with Katie. We get
into all my favorite topics, humanoid robotics, world models, disrupting LMS,
how clawed code shook the AI industry, what US audiences
are missing about tech in China? And Katie also shared
how Wired owned the story of the tumultuous implementation and
(00:59):
subsequent and implosion of Doge in the White House.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
Kenny Drummond, very nice to see you, Very nice to
see you too.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
You are the global editorial director of Wyatt correct the
kind of phrase to me that sums up what you've
been able to do it?
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Why is meeting the moment? How do you do that?
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Oh my gosh, how do you well? First of all,
that's very nice of you to say, how do we
do that? In this moment? I think particularly in the
context of artificial intelligence, right. I mean, there's so much
changing so quickly, we move as quickly as the story does.
I think that we have a newsroom of really excited, hardworking,
animated subject matter experts, and I think that's something that
(01:45):
really differentiates Wired is that we don't employ a bunch
of general interest reporters and editors, right. We really employ
people who understand the nitty gritty of what they cover,
who are very, very deeply immersed in the technology and
are able to explain it to people in very human terms.
I think the way we describe it as conversational authority,
(02:05):
and so I think we just wake up every day
really committed to the idea of helping audiences understand what's happening,
and doing it from a place of authority and expertise
and credibility.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Now, I think, did you start in twenty twenty three?
Speaker 3 (02:20):
I did. I started in September twenty twenty three.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Yeah, because the history.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Of Wide magazine was more about kind of celebrating, in
a sense, the tech industry, right, or at least providing
a forum for tech visionaries to lay out their vision
of what the future could look like or what the
utopian ideas of technology were in the early nineties. So
did you have to do cultural change or did you
have to push back on kind of old school ideas
(02:46):
of what Wired was in order to be a much
more frankly political publication as you are today.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
I did, you know, and not so much from the
point of view of the newsroom and the staff. I
think they were very attuned to what had changed and
what they wanted and needed. Really was just clear direction
about what we were there to do, which is not
so much to act as stenographers. Right, we don't work
in comms for big tech. Our job is to tell
(03:12):
the truth and tell the truth about the promise of
technology and scientific inquiry, but to tell the truth as
well about when that goes awry. And so what they
needed was that direction. I think that the biggest resistance
we encountered, interestingly was from the audience. First of all, right,
Wired had, you know, a cohort of sort of newer
(03:35):
readers and viewers who were very attuned to what we
were doing. But then there was this sort of cohort
of people, probably all of whom have emailed me at
least once saying you're doing to say like I'm canceling
my subscription, and I can't believe that you would ask
these kinds of questions of these companies. I read Wired
to be inspired and excited. I don't read wired to,
(03:57):
you know, see the industry challenged, or to dig in
into politics, like I'm not here for that.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
So do you respond to those emails?
Speaker 3 (04:03):
Or sometimes? Yeah? Sometimes what do I do well? In particular?
You know, if someone emails me with something nice to say,
I always respond to those emails because I think it's
for someone to take five minutes out of their day
to email me to tell me that they love the publication.
I run, like that's really meaningful. So I want to
make sure that I am engaging with those people. And
then sometimes I'll just write back and say, you know,
(04:24):
I'm really sorry to hear that you feel that way.
Best of luck to you on your reading journey with
other publications. You know, I am not going to get
into a back and forth over email with like Dave
from Kansas City. But I do pay attention to what
our audience is telling us and what they're telling me directly.
So the biggest I think point of contention really came
(04:45):
from the audience and then I think from the industry itself,
I think there were a lot of people who were
who work in technology or who maybe we have dealt
with historically, who were maybe dismayed to find that we
no longer covered them the way they were accustomed to,
and so I think there was a transition there that
had to happen.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Do you think, as you look at your tenure so far,
is there one story or signature reporting that in some
sense defines what you've done and what you're aiming to be.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
Yeah. I mean, I think we had a really big
year last year in twenty twenty five, and it's the
catalyst for that was and I you know, not to
get too much into politics, but when President Trump was
elected in the United States and he brought Elon Musk
into the White House and put him in charge of
the Department of Governmental Efficiency DOGE, we were very quick
(05:38):
to that story. And it was because we had journalists
who had covered Elon Musk and his businesses for a
very long time, and then we had built out a
politics team who were you know, very well sourced in
DC and sort of ready to cover the political piece
of that, and so we were very quick to that story.
We were very early to that story, and we really
led the charge in documing sort of exactly what Doge
(06:01):
was doing inside of the federal government. And I think
that's a perfect example for me where this idea that
technology is not political, or that you need to sort
of separate politics from tech is just not true, Like
that is just factually inaccurate. And so I think that
moment for us really crystallized sort of the narrative that
I had created around Wired and what I was trying
to accomplish with Wired, which is just to say technology
(06:24):
is ubiquitous. I mean, this is a mainstream phenomenon, and
you can't untangle it from any any facet of how
we live, from culture, from politics, from security science, everything
that Wired covers, Everything about the way we all live
has technology woven into it, and that includes politics. And
I think what happened with Doge and Musk is a
perfect example of that.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
I imagine if you did, like a Google trend search
for Doge in like January February last year, it would
have been pretty close to the top of the Internet,
which is both a good thing as a magazine or
as an editorial leader, but also a bad thing like
how did you break through it?
Speaker 1 (07:01):
Why?
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Like, how did you move the conversation forward? What did
you say or do about Doge that no one else could?
Speaker 3 (07:06):
I mean, we broke a lot of news. And I
think this is another significant change that I've made at
Wired is that when I started, I think they were
very much thinking of themselves as a print magazine with
an Internet website, right, And so the idea of okay, well,
how do you translate magazine journalism to the Internet While
you look at what's happening in the world. You look
(07:28):
at what news is breaking, and then you react to it,
You analyze it, you tell audiences how to think about it,
and you do that like two or three days after
a big story or a major event has happened. My view, though,
is that Wired should not be the place reacting to
what's happening. We should be the place where it happens.
And so what that means is we should actually be
breaking the stories. We can offer that analysis and that synthesis,
(07:51):
but the origin point needs to come from us. The
Internet is not going to wait two or three days
for your essay. Like, that's like not how it works.
So with Doge, we differentiated ourselves because we were inside
all of these federal agencies as DOGE operatives were doing
what they were doing, and we were breaking stories often
like two, three, four or five times a day for
(08:12):
weeks at a time. That's how we stood out. I mean,
we didn't stand out because we were offering you the
best hot take or the best essay. We stood out
because we were providing new information to audiences, particularly in
the United States, who were deeply concerned and sort of
desperate to understand what was happening inside of the federal government,
and they turned to Wired to answer those questions for them.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
At the same time, you come up with this new
kind of mission statement in a sense for wide which
is for future reference, like what will people look at
ten twenty years from now as significant stories? So I
had to ask you about AI obviously the two letters
on everyone's lips permanently. How do you when you think
about covering AI sought the signal from the noise and
(08:57):
make sure that you are actually covering the people ideas
things that will be meaningful in ten years rather than
just whatever the trend of the day or the hour is.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
Sure, Yeah, I mean I will say I had the
great fortune or misfortune depending on how you look at it.
Of starting my job at Wired maybe like four to
six months after chet GPT first came out, and so
it was all anyone wanted to talk to me about.
Even I remember interviewing for the job, they were like,
how would you cover AI? And that has not changed.
It's been two and a half years. I expect that
in another two and a half years we're still going
(09:28):
to be covering the technology. I mean, it is pervasive
and ubiquitous at this point. But I think it really
comes back to the idea of expertise. So I'll give
an example. With AI. We have a journalist named Will
Knight who has been covering AI for his entire career,
I mean fifteen twenty years. He writes a weekly newsletter
for us AI Lab and he spends his days talking
(09:50):
to academics, reading papers, you know, talking to people inside
of these companies, which means that he is able to
look at a new paper or look at it an
now from Open AI or Anthropic or Microsoft or whomever else,
and be able to distill very quickly what is meaningful
from that and what is not right. He has the
expertise to be able to not only explain to the
(10:13):
audience what's new and interesting and novel about a certain
you know, moment in time with regards to AI, but
he's also able to tell them this matters and this
doesn't matter. So we have Will, for example, on the
sort of research piece of it, and then we have
another journalist, Max Zeff, based in San Francisco, who actually
covers what's going on inside of these companies, so he
(10:35):
sort of is positioned differently where he's tracking, you know,
staffing changes, you know, the latest drama at open AI.
What it means that, you know, Microsoft is investing this
much money in this company and this much money in
this company. So we're able to cover AI and really
sort of cut through all of the noise by having
beat reporters essentially subject matter experts who've been doing this
(10:56):
for a long time, who know the players, who know
the technology, and Will can sort of tackle it from
a research point of view, and Max can tackle it
from like an industry point of view. When if you
combine those things two things together, they each write a
newsletter every week, I think you're going to get a
very clear eyed and sort of very hype free version
of what's actually happening with the tech.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Over the holidays, Clawed code kind of went viral, and
it seemed like sort of regular people using AI went
from sort of summarizing text and creating studio ghibli images
to regular people creating programs that help them in some
way with their lives even though they had no programming background.
(11:38):
And some people said, Okay, this is the true like
watershed moment where the promise of jen Ai kind of diffuses.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
How do you think about that moment? Was it significant
for you?
Speaker 3 (11:48):
And it was actually I you know, and I will
call out a friend I spoke to a couple weeks
ago who's a software engineer. He's been doing it for
twenty five years, has a long history intechnology, and for
years he was saying, this AI stuff with programming is ridiculous.
I don't use it. I'm never going to use it.
(12:08):
It hallucinates, it makes mistakes, It is deeply flawed. The
fact that my CEOs and the companies I work for
are talking about this stuff like a holy grail is insane.
Like we have all had, we are experiencing like a
mass delusion in the tech industry. And this was a
moment for him with cloud code where that changed very
profoundly and very quickly, and he is now actively using
(12:31):
the technology in his work. So I think that again
to just as a journalist, my job is to look
to the people who are actually on the front lines
of this stuff and be able to sort of suss
out what's a moment and what's not based on their input.
And I think that was a really powerful example for
me of like, this is someone who was as skeptical
as they come and as smart as they come about
(12:54):
what he does, who just said like, oh no, this
is actually a really big deal and I need to
interrogate all of the assumptions that I've held for the
last several years about how I do my job. So
I do think it was very meaningful.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
So what do you do with that? As the editorial
director of why like you get an insight like this,
it really is a moment, Like, what do you tell
a newsroom?
Speaker 1 (13:13):
How do you go forward with that?
Speaker 3 (13:15):
Well, I mean they're usually way ahead of me, so
I usually will be like will I talked to him
and he's like, yeah, gotcha. You know it's again it's
just really being in constant communication. I mean, we run
a newsroom that is about twenty five percent San Francisco,
twenty five percent, New York twenty five percent, London twenty
(13:36):
five percent remote. So we are in slack and on
zoom all day. That's that's how I do my job.
It's virtually entirely remote. But it's just about being in
constant communication and really sort of stress testing different ideas,
always talking about sort of new moments and what they mean,
making sure that our coverage is on point. But again,
like someone like Will or Max probably would have said like, yeah,
(13:57):
I could have told you that a week ago. In fact,
I wrote a story about it, you know, five days ago,
and we are working on a couple of sort of
bigger stories about exactly what you're talking about with Anthropic
and sort of what that means for the rest of
the AI industry, because I do think it was a
very seminal moment for a lot of those other companies
to look over there and say like, oh boy, like
(14:17):
we're all of a sudden, very far behind.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
So do you look at this kind of three horse
race between Anthropic, Open Ai and Google and think about
handicapping it or I mean, who do you think, what
do you think the stakes are today.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
If I tried, I would fail miserably. I mean, I
think if you asked me two years ago about Google,
I remember we were talking very seriously about a big
story maybe two years ago, a year and a half ago,
about like how Google lost the AI race. I mean
that's how we were all thinking internally and at You
(14:51):
asked me that same question three months ago, and I
would have said, like, they're killing it, Like they're integrating
this technology into all of the products and services that
we all use every single day, being very smart and
strategic about it. And they already have that commercialized advantage
because we all use Google suite of products. So it's
changing so quickly. And again, you know, Nthropic is another
(15:12):
great example where they just came out and kicked open
a Eyes. But on coding. I don't think it would
be wise or reasonable to try to game out a
winner or a loser here. I think that there will
be many winners. I think there will be many many losers.
What I would say is that when you look at
like the big incumbents right like the Microsoft's and the Googles,
they have a much stronger foundation to stand on than
(15:35):
the Open a Eyes or the anthropics, right. I mean,
these are big, big, big companies who can spend astronomical
sums of money to commercialize this technology, to do it
at a loss for as long as they need to,
essentially in order to win that race. So I think
the question really is of these very well moneyed startups
(15:56):
who will be able to compete and win in that space.
When you have the Googles kind of like threatening to
eat your lunch every other.
Speaker 4 (16:02):
Day after the break, why we need to look to
(16:31):
China to see where the future of tech is going.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Stay with us. It's interesting.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
I mean, I think we've both come from a background
in journalism where your kind of natural tendency is to
be skeptical, right. And I remember about five years ago
somebody talking to me about, you know, drones, ubiquitous drones
and fully self driving vehicles, and I said, you know what,
you know, be careful about swallowing too many of the
the you know, the dictums of the tech companies who
(17:16):
want you to believe in this future, because those both
of those things seem kind of far off. Now they're
both here, right, And so I mean, presumably you, like me,
are skeptical of some of these you know visions painted
by the leaders of these companies, and yet a lot
of them do seem to be coming true. So how
do you balance how do you balance interrogating those visions
(17:38):
at the same time as giving them enough credit for
some of the frankly unexpected wins they may have had.
Speaker 3 (17:44):
Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, I think
the way I talk to the team about it is
we're we are skeptical, but we're not cynical. So I
never want our team to be so dismissive or so
down on technology, or so down on innovation and inquiry
that they can't see like the light that's kind of
beckoning at them through the haze of hype and marketing
(18:05):
and all of that stuff. Right, So we should always
be skeptical, we should never be cynical. And I think
again it comes down to really interrogating the research, right,
really interrogating the work, interrogating who's behind it, right, who
is saying that, What is their background, what are their credentials,
like asking those hard questions, and always being sure that
when you talk to a company or a person making
(18:27):
those kinds of promises right about self driving cars, for example,
that you ask them the hard questions, press them on
the research, know your stuff, have the expertise to know
what to ask, to be able to walk away with
an informed conclusion. Again, we never want to be regurgitating
a press release, but if there is a there there,
if there is something really exciting going on, we want
to be able to translate that for our audience. I mean,
(18:48):
I think self driving car technology is such a great
example because it's been talked about and talked about and
talked about, and I remember sort of like five or
six years ago, there were all of these companies racing
to to win the self driving car thing. A lot
of them are now out of business, and it was
impossible at the time to discern who was going to
emerge victorious or if anyone was. And you look around
(19:10):
now at what WEIMO is doing, it's incredible. Like I
don't know if enough people appreciate what a fierce battle
that has been and how remarkable it is that they
are now operating in what dozens of cities, launching in
dozens more this year, Like it's that is unbelievable. And
so we don't want to lose sight of those really
(19:32):
interesting races and that really interesting research and those really
interesting wins because again, we've been talking about self driving cars,
like probably since before I was born, right, like years
and years and years and years, and now it is
actually here if you go to San Francisco, they're everywhere.
And I want to maintain our sort of excitement and
enthusiasm for that, because like, that's cool as hell, you.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Know, I agree.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
And let's talk about two things that emerge at the
beginning of this year as kind of promises about the
near future. One is humanoid robots, the obsession with humanoid
robots coming out of CS, and the other is world models. Right,
there's a new paradigm of AI which learns from observation
of the physical world rather than from language and numbers.
(20:17):
Maybe that's start with humanoid robotics, Like, do you think
this is going to be the next frontier of technology
in the same way that self driving cars have been?
Speaker 1 (20:25):
Do you think the excitement is warranted?
Speaker 3 (20:27):
You know, I it's so tough because I do love
being a skeptic. And humanoid robots is another great example
of a technology that's been promised for so so so long.
But again I look at the experts that I work with, right,
and so we just put out a big issue about
China and about how sort of how far along China
is in so many ways where the US is lagging behind,
And robotics is a really salient example there right where
(20:50):
China is doing so much incredible work with physical robotics.
Jen Ai is allowing us to train robots in very
different ways. We have some really interesting stories coming out
about physical robotics being run by certain large companies, global companies,
and what that means for the workforce. And I look
at our reporters and I trust them, and I look
(21:11):
at the work that they're doing on this subject, and
I have to say, it's very very compelling what is
happening with robotics. I don't know if ultimately the shape
and form of these is humanoid, right, I think the
idea of like a Jetson's like a robot doing your
dishes for you. I think less about it in that
context and more about it in the context of like warehouses,
(21:31):
fulfillment centers, like robots doing a lot of the kind
of grunt work in those industrial settings. But that is
very real, and the research being done in those spaces
is very real. It's very interesting, it's very promising. I mean,
this is still incredibly expensive technology to deploy right to
actually commercialize physical robots at scale. So again, this is
(21:52):
not something that will be in your house in five years.
But will robots and sort of physical robotics take a
much larger role in industrial contexts. I think I hate
to make a prediction. I guess it's part of my job.
I would be willing to predict that, yes, we will
see that happen, and I think we will see it
happen in a way that in the same way we've
seen Waimo kind of like take over the streets in
(22:16):
many cities. I think we will have that same moment
with robotics in a few years. I really do big cool,
big call come back in five years and ask me.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
Okay, what about world models, Because obviously you have anthropic
and open AI raising raising racing towards IPOs that you know,
valuations approaching a trillion dollars later this year.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
And then you have.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Faith A Lee and Yan Lacun kind of pioneers of
this AI moment, both of whom saying no, no, the
next wave of AI won't come from this same approach.
There are these world models coming it's quite hard to
get your head around.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
But how do you how do you look at that?
Speaker 3 (22:52):
I first interviewed Yan Lacuhn in two thousand and eight
when I was like, I don't know, twenty years old.
I think he's brilliant. I think he has always been
someone to zig where others are zagging, right, and I
think that makes him really interesting. I think he's he's
a pioneer in his field. I mean Fayfe as well,
and I think there's a real there there. I mean,
I think we've seen a lot of research in the
last several months about the limitations of lllms and the
(23:15):
fact that there is sort of a natural and necessary
endpoint to what they can accomplish. So I think that
the idea of a different paradigm for leveling up artificial
intelligence is right, whether it's world models or whether there
is sort of something else out there that remains to
be seen. But I think there's there's really no question
(23:36):
that lllm's at some point like will have a finite
there will we finite applications for how how much we
can utilize those right, like how much further we can
really press them. I think that's really true. And so
I think what will be interesting to watch there is
what that means for the open ayes and the anthropics
of the world right, and what it means potentially for
new companies that might come in to play, like what
(23:58):
Yan is doing now, and whether they can sort of
compete and make you know, a major leap forward with
the tech.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
And you mentioned this China issue.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
What do you think American audiences or readers are missing
about the China tech story, like your what was your
hope in terms of publishing those twenty three ways? We're
already living in a Chinese century.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
Look. I mean I grew up in Canada and looked
to the United States with a great deal of reverence
and aspiration. I think it's it's an aspirational place for
so many people. I think though, that very often in
the United States we tend to look inward, and we
don't tend to look past our own borders. Often enough,
(24:42):
we don't appreciate or acknowledge the innovation and the technological
progress happening in other parts of the world. I mean,
even sitting here with you in Doha, right, there's no
denying there is a ton of money and a ton
of research and a ton of really interesting technological progress
happening in this part of the world, let alone China,
that American audiences, I would argue, don't spend enough time
(25:03):
engaging with. And so I think, you know, we really
wanted to be a little bit cheeky and maybe a
little bit clever with that issue by saying, we have
a president in the United States right now, who is
you know, promising to make this the best country in
the world, make America great again. And I would argue
that in many ways that is not exactly what we
are seeing. And I would urge American audiences to look elsewhere,
(25:26):
to look to China, to look to you know, the
Middle East, to look to other parts of the world
and acknowledge and grapple with the fact that there's a
lot of really interesting, profound stuff happening and it just
so happens that it's not happening happening in the United States.
And I think they need to we all need to
really think very hard about what that means for the
future of the country that we all live in.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
It's interesting this nine to ninety six concept, like nine
now is a day, six days a week, which was
kind of a little bit of a stick to beat
China with in terms of, oh, you know, they're only
obsessed with work, and they haven't you know, left room
for personal self realization the same way that we have
in the US. Five years ago that was a real
(26:10):
criticism of China, and now in the US tech industry
it's almost like an aspiration. You have this idea of
like cracked engineers and basically learning as much as possible
from Chinese work culture amongst the Silicon Valley youth. I
just find such an interesting inversion why it was born
in the early nineties when today's tech overlords were in
their twenties. Essentially, Yeah, what's the culture of the new
(26:33):
eighteen to twenty fives in Silicon Valley? What are you
seeing about them and how they're relating to the world
that already grabs you.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
Well, it's funny because I feel like nine ninety six
was really always the way people in startup world worked.
I mean, we just inher We just took a name
from China and sort of applied it to our own industry,
which I think speaks to China's sort of outsize cultural influence.
I mean, I think the most interesting thing to me
about sort of young tech culture and startup culture now
(27:02):
is how completely consumed it is with AI. And I
think that the smartest, most strategic founders today in that
cohort are using AI in ways that their predecessors twenty
years ago could only imagine. I mean, they are building
and running their entire companies. It's not just that they
have an idea for a company that they can build
(27:24):
based on AI. They're using AI to build the entire
company right and they're doing it at a very accelerated pace.
So that to me is fascinating, and I am fascinated
to see in ten or twenty years what that yields,
because the barrier to entry for a startup founder now
is drastically lower than it was twenty years ago. I mean,
if you have access to an LM, if you have
(27:45):
access to Jenai, you can get a lot done in
a day, let alone six days, nine hours a day
compared to twenty or thirty years ago.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Maybe the Unicorn of one will happen.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Maybe, Katie Justiclose, we're here in Doha, why it has
recently integrated Wired Middle East.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
What are you hoping for from that team?
Speaker 2 (28:05):
I mean, obviously some of the stories are around data centers,
some of them are around investment in US companies, some
of them around regional competition. What do you think the
key storyline is coming out of why Middle East in
the next year will be Oh wow.
Speaker 3 (28:20):
I mean there's so many and so we're launching Wired
Middle East in a couple weeks in mid February. It's
an amazing team. I mean, we operate Wired in a
lot of markets around the world. I would say there
is no place in the world I'm more excited for
Wired to be showing up right now than here. And
it is because this is the Middle East is a
hub of so much change and so much transformation, and
(28:41):
I am much less interested, I would say, in how
this part of the world interacts with the United States
than I am in how this part of the world
stands on its own two feet, right. What is happening
here with regards to science, with regards to technology, with
regards to digital culture, the way people live their lives
in a connected way, I think is deserving of more
(29:03):
attention from a global stage. And I think this team
will bring that same skepticism, but that same sort of
enthusiasm and rigor and those same journalistic values that we
do in every other wired that we operate in the
United States, and they will bring that to bear on
what's happening here. And I can't wait to see what
they're going to do. I know that they plan to
go at an eleven out of ten, so I'm just
(29:24):
going to sit back and watch.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
Katie Drumwell, Global Editorial Director wife, thank you, Thank you.
(29:56):
That's it for this week for tech stuff. I'mos velocian.
Is that Elis was produced by Eliza Dennis and Melissa Slaughter.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
It was executive.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
Produced by me Cara Price, Julia Nutter, and Kate Osborne
for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvel for iHeart Podcasts. Jack Insley
mixed this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song.
Please do rate and review the show wherever you listen
to your podcasts.
Welcome to tech stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
I'm os Voloscan and this week I've been in Doha,
Cutter attending the Web Summit. I had the opportunity to
have a conversation on stage with Katie Drummond, who is
the Global editorial director of Wired and is wide. They
admired for having made the brand more essential and more
relevant than ever. So instead of the Week in Tech,
(00:37):
I wanted to share my conversation with Katie. We get
into all my favorite topics, humanoid robotics, world models, disrupting LMS,
how clawed code shook the AI industry, what US audiences
are missing about tech in China? And Katie also shared
how Wired owned the story of the tumultuous implementation and
(00:59):
subsequent and implosion of Doge in the White House.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
Kenny Drummond, very nice to see you, Very nice to
see you too.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
You are the global editorial director of Wyatt correct the
kind of phrase to me that sums up what you've
been able to do it?
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Why is meeting the moment? How do you do that?
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Oh my gosh, how do you well? First of all,
that's very nice of you to say, how do we
do that? In this moment? I think particularly in the
context of artificial intelligence, right. I mean, there's so much
changing so quickly, we move as quickly as the story does.
I think that we have a newsroom of really excited, hardworking,
animated subject matter experts, and I think that's something that
(01:45):
really differentiates Wired is that we don't employ a bunch
of general interest reporters and editors, right. We really employ
people who understand the nitty gritty of what they cover,
who are very, very deeply immersed in the technology and
are able to explain it to people in very human terms.
I think the way we describe it as conversational authority,
(02:05):
and so I think we just wake up every day
really committed to the idea of helping audiences understand what's happening,
and doing it from a place of authority and expertise
and credibility.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Now, I think, did you start in twenty twenty three?
Speaker 3 (02:20):
I did. I started in September twenty twenty three.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Yeah, because the history.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Of Wide magazine was more about kind of celebrating, in
a sense, the tech industry, right, or at least providing
a forum for tech visionaries to lay out their vision
of what the future could look like or what the
utopian ideas of technology were in the early nineties. So
did you have to do cultural change or did you
have to push back on kind of old school ideas
(02:46):
of what Wired was in order to be a much
more frankly political publication as you are today.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
I did, you know, and not so much from the
point of view of the newsroom and the staff. I
think they were very attuned to what had changed and
what they wanted and needed. Really was just clear direction
about what we were there to do, which is not
so much to act as stenographers. Right, we don't work
in comms for big tech. Our job is to tell
(03:12):
the truth and tell the truth about the promise of
technology and scientific inquiry, but to tell the truth as
well about when that goes awry. And so what they
needed was that direction. I think that the biggest resistance
we encountered, interestingly was from the audience. First of all, right,
Wired had, you know, a cohort of sort of newer
(03:35):
readers and viewers who were very attuned to what we
were doing. But then there was this sort of cohort
of people, probably all of whom have emailed me at
least once saying you're doing to say like I'm canceling
my subscription, and I can't believe that you would ask
these kinds of questions of these companies. I read Wired
to be inspired and excited. I don't read wired to,
(03:57):
you know, see the industry challenged, or to dig in
into politics, like I'm not here for that.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
So do you respond to those emails?
Speaker 3 (04:03):
Or sometimes? Yeah? Sometimes what do I do well? In particular?
You know, if someone emails me with something nice to say,
I always respond to those emails because I think it's
for someone to take five minutes out of their day
to email me to tell me that they love the publication.
I run, like that's really meaningful. So I want to
make sure that I am engaging with those people. And
then sometimes I'll just write back and say, you know,
(04:24):
I'm really sorry to hear that you feel that way.
Best of luck to you on your reading journey with
other publications. You know, I am not going to get
into a back and forth over email with like Dave
from Kansas City. But I do pay attention to what
our audience is telling us and what they're telling me directly.
So the biggest I think point of contention really came
(04:45):
from the audience and then I think from the industry itself,
I think there were a lot of people who were
who work in technology or who maybe we have dealt
with historically, who were maybe dismayed to find that we
no longer covered them the way they were accustomed to,
and so I think there was a transition there that
had to happen.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Do you think, as you look at your tenure so far,
is there one story or signature reporting that in some
sense defines what you've done and what you're aiming to be.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
Yeah. I mean, I think we had a really big
year last year in twenty twenty five, and it's the
catalyst for that was and I you know, not to
get too much into politics, but when President Trump was
elected in the United States and he brought Elon Musk
into the White House and put him in charge of
the Department of Governmental Efficiency DOGE, we were very quick
(05:38):
to that story. And it was because we had journalists
who had covered Elon Musk and his businesses for a
very long time, and then we had built out a
politics team who were you know, very well sourced in
DC and sort of ready to cover the political piece
of that, and so we were very quick to that story.
We were very early to that story, and we really
led the charge in documing sort of exactly what Doge
(06:01):
was doing inside of the federal government. And I think
that's a perfect example for me where this idea that
technology is not political, or that you need to sort
of separate politics from tech is just not true, Like
that is just factually inaccurate. And so I think that
moment for us really crystallized sort of the narrative that
I had created around Wired and what I was trying
to accomplish with Wired, which is just to say technology
(06:24):
is ubiquitous. I mean, this is a mainstream phenomenon, and
you can't untangle it from any any facet of how
we live, from culture, from politics, from security science, everything
that Wired covers, Everything about the way we all live
has technology woven into it, and that includes politics. And
I think what happened with Doge and Musk is a
perfect example of that.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
I imagine if you did, like a Google trend search
for Doge in like January February last year, it would
have been pretty close to the top of the Internet,
which is both a good thing as a magazine or
as an editorial leader, but also a bad thing like
how did you break through it?
Speaker 1 (07:01):
Why?
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Like, how did you move the conversation forward? What did
you say or do about Doge that no one else could?
Speaker 3 (07:06):
I mean, we broke a lot of news. And I
think this is another significant change that I've made at
Wired is that when I started, I think they were
very much thinking of themselves as a print magazine with
an Internet website, right, And so the idea of okay, well,
how do you translate magazine journalism to the Internet While
you look at what's happening in the world. You look
(07:28):
at what news is breaking, and then you react to it,
You analyze it, you tell audiences how to think about it,
and you do that like two or three days after
a big story or a major event has happened. My view, though,
is that Wired should not be the place reacting to
what's happening. We should be the place where it happens.
And so what that means is we should actually be
breaking the stories. We can offer that analysis and that synthesis,
(07:51):
but the origin point needs to come from us. The
Internet is not going to wait two or three days
for your essay. Like, that's like not how it works.
So with Doge, we differentiated ourselves because we were inside
all of these federal agencies as DOGE operatives were doing
what they were doing, and we were breaking stories often
like two, three, four or five times a day for
(08:12):
weeks at a time. That's how we stood out. I mean,
we didn't stand out because we were offering you the
best hot take or the best essay. We stood out
because we were providing new information to audiences, particularly in
the United States, who were deeply concerned and sort of
desperate to understand what was happening inside of the federal government,
and they turned to Wired to answer those questions for them.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
At the same time, you come up with this new
kind of mission statement in a sense for wide which
is for future reference, like what will people look at
ten twenty years from now as significant stories? So I
had to ask you about AI obviously the two letters
on everyone's lips permanently. How do you when you think
about covering AI sought the signal from the noise and
(08:57):
make sure that you are actually covering the people ideas
things that will be meaningful in ten years rather than
just whatever the trend of the day or the hour is.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
Sure, Yeah, I mean I will say I had the
great fortune or misfortune depending on how you look at it.
Of starting my job at Wired maybe like four to
six months after chet GPT first came out, and so
it was all anyone wanted to talk to me about.
Even I remember interviewing for the job, they were like,
how would you cover AI? And that has not changed.
It's been two and a half years. I expect that
in another two and a half years we're still going
(09:28):
to be covering the technology. I mean, it is pervasive
and ubiquitous at this point. But I think it really
comes back to the idea of expertise. So I'll give
an example. With AI. We have a journalist named Will
Knight who has been covering AI for his entire career,
I mean fifteen twenty years. He writes a weekly newsletter
for us AI Lab and he spends his days talking
(09:50):
to academics, reading papers, you know, talking to people inside
of these companies, which means that he is able to
look at a new paper or look at it an
now from Open AI or Anthropic or Microsoft or whomever else,
and be able to distill very quickly what is meaningful
from that and what is not right. He has the
expertise to be able to not only explain to the
(10:13):
audience what's new and interesting and novel about a certain
you know, moment in time with regards to AI, but
he's also able to tell them this matters and this
doesn't matter. So we have Will, for example, on the
sort of research piece of it, and then we have
another journalist, Max Zeff, based in San Francisco, who actually
covers what's going on inside of these companies, so he
(10:35):
sort of is positioned differently where he's tracking, you know,
staffing changes, you know, the latest drama at open AI.
What it means that, you know, Microsoft is investing this
much money in this company and this much money in
this company. So we're able to cover AI and really
sort of cut through all of the noise by having
beat reporters essentially subject matter experts who've been doing this
(10:56):
for a long time, who know the players, who know
the technology, and Will can sort of tackle it from
a research point of view, and Max can tackle it
from like an industry point of view. When if you
combine those things two things together, they each write a
newsletter every week, I think you're going to get a
very clear eyed and sort of very hype free version
of what's actually happening with the tech.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Over the holidays, Clawed code kind of went viral, and
it seemed like sort of regular people using AI went
from sort of summarizing text and creating studio ghibli images
to regular people creating programs that help them in some
way with their lives even though they had no programming background.
(11:38):
And some people said, Okay, this is the true like
watershed moment where the promise of jen Ai kind of diffuses.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
How do you think about that moment? Was it significant
for you?
Speaker 3 (11:48):
And it was actually I you know, and I will
call out a friend I spoke to a couple weeks
ago who's a software engineer. He's been doing it for
twenty five years, has a long history intechnology, and for
years he was saying, this AI stuff with programming is ridiculous.
I don't use it. I'm never going to use it.
(12:08):
It hallucinates, it makes mistakes, It is deeply flawed. The
fact that my CEOs and the companies I work for
are talking about this stuff like a holy grail is insane.
Like we have all had, we are experiencing like a
mass delusion in the tech industry. And this was a
moment for him with cloud code where that changed very
profoundly and very quickly, and he is now actively using
(12:31):
the technology in his work. So I think that again
to just as a journalist, my job is to look
to the people who are actually on the front lines
of this stuff and be able to sort of suss
out what's a moment and what's not based on their input.
And I think that was a really powerful example for
me of like, this is someone who was as skeptical
as they come and as smart as they come about
(12:54):
what he does, who just said like, oh no, this
is actually a really big deal and I need to
interrogate all of the assumptions that I've held for the
last several years about how I do my job. So
I do think it was very meaningful.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
So what do you do with that? As the editorial
director of why like you get an insight like this,
it really is a moment, Like, what do you tell
a newsroom?
Speaker 1 (13:13):
How do you go forward with that?
Speaker 3 (13:15):
Well, I mean they're usually way ahead of me, so
I usually will be like will I talked to him
and he's like, yeah, gotcha. You know it's again it's
just really being in constant communication. I mean, we run
a newsroom that is about twenty five percent San Francisco,
twenty five percent, New York twenty five percent, London twenty
(13:36):
five percent remote. So we are in slack and on
zoom all day. That's that's how I do my job.
It's virtually entirely remote. But it's just about being in
constant communication and really sort of stress testing different ideas,
always talking about sort of new moments and what they mean,
making sure that our coverage is on point. But again,
like someone like Will or Max probably would have said like, yeah,
(13:57):
I could have told you that a week ago. In fact,
I wrote a story about it, you know, five days ago,
and we are working on a couple of sort of
bigger stories about exactly what you're talking about with Anthropic
and sort of what that means for the rest of
the AI industry, because I do think it was a
very seminal moment for a lot of those other companies
to look over there and say like, oh boy, like
(14:17):
we're all of a sudden, very far behind.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
So do you look at this kind of three horse
race between Anthropic, Open Ai and Google and think about
handicapping it or I mean, who do you think, what
do you think the stakes are today.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
If I tried, I would fail miserably. I mean, I
think if you asked me two years ago about Google,
I remember we were talking very seriously about a big
story maybe two years ago, a year and a half ago,
about like how Google lost the AI race. I mean
that's how we were all thinking internally and at You
(14:51):
asked me that same question three months ago, and I
would have said, like, they're killing it, Like they're integrating
this technology into all of the products and services that
we all use every single day, being very smart and
strategic about it. And they already have that commercialized advantage
because we all use Google suite of products. So it's
changing so quickly. And again, you know, Nthropic is another
(15:12):
great example where they just came out and kicked open
a Eyes. But on coding. I don't think it would
be wise or reasonable to try to game out a
winner or a loser here. I think that there will
be many winners. I think there will be many many losers.
What I would say is that when you look at
like the big incumbents right like the Microsoft's and the Googles,
they have a much stronger foundation to stand on than
(15:35):
the Open a Eyes or the anthropics, right. I mean,
these are big, big, big companies who can spend astronomical
sums of money to commercialize this technology, to do it
at a loss for as long as they need to,
essentially in order to win that race. So I think
the question really is of these very well moneyed startups
(15:56):
who will be able to compete and win in that space.
When you have the Googles kind of like threatening to
eat your lunch every other.
Speaker 4 (16:02):
Day after the break, why we need to look to
(16:31):
China to see where the future of tech is going.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Stay with us. It's interesting.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
I mean, I think we've both come from a background
in journalism where your kind of natural tendency is to
be skeptical, right. And I remember about five years ago
somebody talking to me about, you know, drones, ubiquitous drones
and fully self driving vehicles, and I said, you know what,
you know, be careful about swallowing too many of the
the you know, the dictums of the tech companies who
(17:16):
want you to believe in this future, because those both
of those things seem kind of far off. Now they're
both here, right, And so I mean, presumably you, like me,
are skeptical of some of these you know visions painted
by the leaders of these companies, and yet a lot
of them do seem to be coming true. So how
do you balance how do you balance interrogating those visions
(17:38):
at the same time as giving them enough credit for
some of the frankly unexpected wins they may have had.
Speaker 3 (17:44):
Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, I think
the way I talk to the team about it is
we're we are skeptical, but we're not cynical. So I
never want our team to be so dismissive or so
down on technology, or so down on innovation and inquiry
that they can't see like the light that's kind of
beckoning at them through the haze of hype and marketing
(18:05):
and all of that stuff. Right, So we should always
be skeptical, we should never be cynical. And I think
again it comes down to really interrogating the research, right,
really interrogating the work, interrogating who's behind it, right, who
is saying that, What is their background, what are their credentials,
like asking those hard questions, and always being sure that
when you talk to a company or a person making
(18:27):
those kinds of promises right about self driving cars, for example,
that you ask them the hard questions, press them on
the research, know your stuff, have the expertise to know
what to ask, to be able to walk away with
an informed conclusion. Again, we never want to be regurgitating
a press release, but if there is a there there,
if there is something really exciting going on, we want
to be able to translate that for our audience. I mean,
(18:48):
I think self driving car technology is such a great
example because it's been talked about and talked about and
talked about, and I remember sort of like five or
six years ago, there were all of these companies racing
to to win the self driving car thing. A lot
of them are now out of business, and it was
impossible at the time to discern who was going to
emerge victorious or if anyone was. And you look around
(19:10):
now at what WEIMO is doing, it's incredible. Like I
don't know if enough people appreciate what a fierce battle
that has been and how remarkable it is that they
are now operating in what dozens of cities, launching in
dozens more this year, Like it's that is unbelievable. And
so we don't want to lose sight of those really
(19:32):
interesting races and that really interesting research and those really
interesting wins because again, we've been talking about self driving cars,
like probably since before I was born, right, like years
and years and years and years, and now it is
actually here if you go to San Francisco, they're everywhere.
And I want to maintain our sort of excitement and
enthusiasm for that, because like, that's cool as hell, you.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Know, I agree.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
And let's talk about two things that emerge at the
beginning of this year as kind of promises about the
near future. One is humanoid robots, the obsession with humanoid
robots coming out of CS, and the other is world models. Right,
there's a new paradigm of AI which learns from observation
of the physical world rather than from language and numbers.
(20:17):
Maybe that's start with humanoid robotics, Like, do you think
this is going to be the next frontier of technology
in the same way that self driving cars have been?
Speaker 1 (20:25):
Do you think the excitement is warranted?
Speaker 3 (20:27):
You know, I it's so tough because I do love
being a skeptic. And humanoid robots is another great example
of a technology that's been promised for so so so long.
But again I look at the experts that I work with, right,
and so we just put out a big issue about
China and about how sort of how far along China
is in so many ways where the US is lagging behind,
And robotics is a really salient example there right where
(20:50):
China is doing so much incredible work with physical robotics.
Jen Ai is allowing us to train robots in very
different ways. We have some really interesting stories coming out
about physical robotics being run by certain large companies, global companies,
and what that means for the workforce. And I look
at our reporters and I trust them, and I look
(21:11):
at the work that they're doing on this subject, and
I have to say, it's very very compelling what is
happening with robotics. I don't know if ultimately the shape
and form of these is humanoid, right, I think the
idea of like a Jetson's like a robot doing your
dishes for you. I think less about it in that
context and more about it in the context of like warehouses,
(21:31):
fulfillment centers, like robots doing a lot of the kind
of grunt work in those industrial settings. But that is
very real, and the research being done in those spaces
is very real. It's very interesting, it's very promising. I mean,
this is still incredibly expensive technology to deploy right to
actually commercialize physical robots at scale. So again, this is
(21:52):
not something that will be in your house in five years.
But will robots and sort of physical robotics take a
much larger role in industrial contexts. I think I hate
to make a prediction. I guess it's part of my job.
I would be willing to predict that, yes, we will
see that happen, and I think we will see it
happen in a way that in the same way we've
seen Waimo kind of like take over the streets in
(22:16):
many cities. I think we will have that same moment
with robotics in a few years. I really do big cool,
big call come back in five years and ask me.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
Okay, what about world models, Because obviously you have anthropic
and open AI raising raising racing towards IPOs that you know,
valuations approaching a trillion dollars later this year.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
And then you have.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Faith A Lee and Yan Lacun kind of pioneers of
this AI moment, both of whom saying no, no, the
next wave of AI won't come from this same approach.
There are these world models coming it's quite hard to
get your head around.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
But how do you how do you look at that?
Speaker 3 (22:52):
I first interviewed Yan Lacuhn in two thousand and eight
when I was like, I don't know, twenty years old.
I think he's brilliant. I think he has always been
someone to zig where others are zagging, right, and I
think that makes him really interesting. I think he's he's
a pioneer in his field. I mean Fayfe as well,
and I think there's a real there there. I mean,
I think we've seen a lot of research in the
last several months about the limitations of lllms and the
(23:15):
fact that there is sort of a natural and necessary
endpoint to what they can accomplish. So I think that
the idea of a different paradigm for leveling up artificial
intelligence is right, whether it's world models or whether there
is sort of something else out there that remains to
be seen. But I think there's there's really no question
(23:36):
that lllm's at some point like will have a finite
there will we finite applications for how how much we
can utilize those right, like how much further we can
really press them. I think that's really true. And so
I think what will be interesting to watch there is
what that means for the open ayes and the anthropics
of the world right, and what it means potentially for
new companies that might come in to play, like what
(23:58):
Yan is doing now, and whether they can sort of
compete and make you know, a major leap forward with
the tech.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
And you mentioned this China issue.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
What do you think American audiences or readers are missing
about the China tech story, like your what was your
hope in terms of publishing those twenty three ways? We're
already living in a Chinese century.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
Look. I mean I grew up in Canada and looked
to the United States with a great deal of reverence
and aspiration. I think it's it's an aspirational place for
so many people. I think though, that very often in
the United States we tend to look inward, and we
don't tend to look past our own borders. Often enough,
(24:42):
we don't appreciate or acknowledge the innovation and the technological
progress happening in other parts of the world. I mean,
even sitting here with you in Doha, right, there's no
denying there is a ton of money and a ton
of research and a ton of really interesting technological progress
happening in this part of the world, let alone China,
that American audiences, I would argue, don't spend enough time
(25:03):
engaging with. And so I think, you know, we really
wanted to be a little bit cheeky and maybe a
little bit clever with that issue by saying, we have
a president in the United States right now, who is
you know, promising to make this the best country in
the world, make America great again. And I would argue
that in many ways that is not exactly what we
are seeing. And I would urge American audiences to look elsewhere,
(25:26):
to look to China, to look to you know, the
Middle East, to look to other parts of the world
and acknowledge and grapple with the fact that there's a
lot of really interesting, profound stuff happening and it just
so happens that it's not happening happening in the United States.
And I think they need to we all need to
really think very hard about what that means for the
future of the country that we all live in.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
It's interesting this nine to ninety six concept, like nine
now is a day, six days a week, which was
kind of a little bit of a stick to beat
China with in terms of, oh, you know, they're only
obsessed with work, and they haven't you know, left room
for personal self realization the same way that we have
in the US. Five years ago that was a real
(26:10):
criticism of China, and now in the US tech industry
it's almost like an aspiration. You have this idea of
like cracked engineers and basically learning as much as possible
from Chinese work culture amongst the Silicon Valley youth. I
just find such an interesting inversion why it was born
in the early nineties when today's tech overlords were in
their twenties. Essentially, Yeah, what's the culture of the new
(26:33):
eighteen to twenty fives in Silicon Valley? What are you
seeing about them and how they're relating to the world
that already grabs you.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
Well, it's funny because I feel like nine ninety six
was really always the way people in startup world worked.
I mean, we just inher We just took a name
from China and sort of applied it to our own industry,
which I think speaks to China's sort of outsize cultural influence.
I mean, I think the most interesting thing to me
about sort of young tech culture and startup culture now
(27:02):
is how completely consumed it is with AI. And I
think that the smartest, most strategic founders today in that
cohort are using AI in ways that their predecessors twenty
years ago could only imagine. I mean, they are building
and running their entire companies. It's not just that they
have an idea for a company that they can build
(27:24):
based on AI. They're using AI to build the entire
company right and they're doing it at a very accelerated pace.
So that to me is fascinating, and I am fascinated
to see in ten or twenty years what that yields,
because the barrier to entry for a startup founder now
is drastically lower than it was twenty years ago. I mean,
if you have access to an LM, if you have
(27:45):
access to Jenai, you can get a lot done in
a day, let alone six days, nine hours a day
compared to twenty or thirty years ago.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Maybe the Unicorn of one will happen.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Maybe, Katie Justiclose, we're here in Doha, why it has
recently integrated Wired Middle East.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
What are you hoping for from that team?
Speaker 2 (28:05):
I mean, obviously some of the stories are around data centers,
some of them are around investment in US companies, some
of them around regional competition. What do you think the
key storyline is coming out of why Middle East in
the next year will be Oh wow.
Speaker 3 (28:20):
I mean there's so many and so we're launching Wired
Middle East in a couple weeks in mid February. It's
an amazing team. I mean, we operate Wired in a
lot of markets around the world. I would say there
is no place in the world I'm more excited for
Wired to be showing up right now than here. And
it is because this is the Middle East is a
hub of so much change and so much transformation, and
(28:41):
I am much less interested, I would say, in how
this part of the world interacts with the United States
than I am in how this part of the world
stands on its own two feet, right. What is happening
here with regards to science, with regards to technology, with
regards to digital culture, the way people live their lives
in a connected way, I think is deserving of more
(29:03):
attention from a global stage. And I think this team
will bring that same skepticism, but that same sort of
enthusiasm and rigor and those same journalistic values that we
do in every other wired that we operate in the
United States, and they will bring that to bear on
what's happening here. And I can't wait to see what
they're going to do. I know that they plan to
go at an eleven out of ten, so I'm just
(29:24):
going to sit back and watch.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
Katie Drumwell, Global Editorial Director wife, thank you, Thank you.
(29:56):
That's it for this week for tech stuff. I'mos velocian.
Is that Elis was produced by Eliza Dennis and Melissa Slaughter.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
It was executive.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
Produced by me Cara Price, Julia Nutter, and Kate Osborne
for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvel for iHeart Podcasts. Jack Insley
mixed this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song.
Please do rate and review the show wherever you listen
to your podcasts.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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