Silicon Valley tech types love their edgy new social media startups. The latest is Airchat, an audio-first social app that lets its users express their every thought by posting short snippets of audio. All of these snippets are served in a never-ending feed, à la Twitter. There are replies, there are DMs, but there’s no typing; it’s all spoken audio. The platform is exclusively invitation-only for now, so the current user base is made up mostly of Valley insiders, optimistic venture capitalists, and crypto evangelists, which definitely informs the types of conversations you’ll find on the app. If you’re thinking this sounds a lot like Clubhouse, the audio-based social space that flared up during the Covid-19 pandemic, well, you’re not too far off.
This week on Gadget Lab, we talk to WIRED’s director of special projects, Alan Henry, about making mouth sounds on Airchat and whether the buzzy new social startup will appeal to anyone outside the Silicon Valley technosphere.
Read Lauren’s story about Airchat.
Alan recommends the Kurzgesagt YouTube channel. Lauren recommends Julian Chokkattu’s review of the Humane Ai Pin and Scoop, a movie about journalism that’s streaming on Netflix. Mike recommends our new sibling podcast, WIRED Politics Lab.
Alan can be found on social media @halophoenix. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
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Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]
Michael Calore: Lauren.
Lauren Goode: Mike.
Michael Calore: How excited would you be about a new social network where you just listen to people talk?
Lauren Goode: Like reply guys on Twitter or you mean Clubhouse?
Michael Calore: Well, sure, but also in addition to getting to hear people talk, you can also just read their posts and feed.
Lauren Goode: Oh, so like Clubhouse but on Twitter?
Michael Calore: Sort of. But do either of those comparisons really bode well for a new social app?
Lauren Goode: We're talking about a new social app? Did Silicon Valley come up with a new social app?
Michael Calore: Yes, it has. And we should talk about it because you actually wrote a story about it.
Lauren Goode: It's true. I did. This is all just a setup.
Michael Calore: OK, let's do it.
Lauren Goode: Let's do it.
Michael Calore: Hi everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I am Michael Calore, WIRED’s director of consumer tech and culture.
Lauren Goode: And I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior writer at WIRED.
Michael Calore: We are also joined once again by WIRED's director of special projects, Alan Henry. Alan, welcome back to the show.
Alan Henry: Thanks for having me.
Lauren Goode: It's great to have you, Alan.
Alan Henry: It's always good to be here.
Michael Calore: Alan is joining us today because like Lauren, he also got an early invite to this new app everyone is talking about. It's called Airchat, and we twisted his arm to tell us his thoughts.
Alan Henry: It wasn't that much of an arm twisting. I have many opinions.
Michael Calore: OK, great. Well, so it does feel like the 2010s all over again. Today we are talking about Airchat, a new social media app that's getting a lot of attention in tech circles. And the thing that sets Airchat apart in the social media world is that it's voice only. There is no typing allowed. The app shows you a feed of posts from all of the people you follow, but their posts are audio clips. Everyone is into leaving voice notes in their private messaging apps these days. This is like that, but in public. Your voice notes get sent out to the world immediately. It's like a chaotic marriage of Twitter and Clubhouse with a side of voicemail. Airchat is also invite only, so of course all the Silicon Valley elites are on it. That also means there's a long list of people stuck on the outside who are very interested in waiting their turn to get in. Now, Lauren, you are a Silicon Valley Insider.
Lauren Goode: Oof, am I?
Michael Calore: You are. Yes.
Lauren Goode: What does that mean?
Michael Calore: Capital S, capital V, capital I. And you got an invite to Airchat. You used it, you wrote about it. Please explain Airchat to us.
Lauren Goode: How do I even begin? Maybe we should start with a little context, which is that over the past 20 years, Silicon Valley has obviously transformed our social lives with the rise of social media. And then, when the app store launched in 2008, things changed even more because suddenly there was this combination of constraint, like you can only do and see so much on a physical phone screen, with these far extending capabilities and sometimes an overreach like being able to track your location. It also means you can take photos and videos and dash off posts from anywhere because of our mobile phones. So, a lot of companies over the years have tried to launch social apps that take advantage of all of this, and some have been very successful like Instagram and until recently Twitter. Many, many others have failed. Airchat is another attempt to make this work as a new social media app.
Michael Calore: I see. So it's a feed of audio snippets.
Lauren Goode: Right. When you open the app, what it's going to look like is actually a feed of text blocks, but there's a play/pause button in the lower … Everyone always makes fun of the way I say button. I'm sorry. That's how it comes out.
Michael Calore: It's very Connecticut. That's not a dig.
Lauren Goode: Silicon Valley, Connecticut.
Michael Calore: That's not a dig.
Lauren Goode: OK. So when you open the app, you see the text blocks and then there is the play pause button in the lower right. And when you tap play, it starts to play the audio. So it is an audio first app because the way that you share is you hold down the record button and then you record a voice note and as soon as you let go, it goes into the feed. But because of the nearly live transcription feature in the app, it also prints out those text blocks immediately. And so, you can read those as you're listening to it. And it is kind of this, I like how you used the word chaotic. It is kind of this chaotic Twitter experience, but as you were scrolling Twitter, everything was being read aloud to you.
Michael Calore: So it's just an endless scroll of people talking?
Lauren Goode: Right. And there are mechanisms that honestly aren't fully clear to me yet. You can follow people, they can follow you. You see replies. The replies get very confusing. The threads, they get very confusing. It's hard to go back and find the thing that you saw earlier or pardon me, listened to earlier. There are some rules around what replies you can listen to and which ones you can't because you can mute or block people. Yeah, it's a little bit confounding, which is what I wrote in the WIRED story. It is a little bit unique because it's asynchronous audio, whereas one of the references you made earlier, Clubhouse was just a live stream of audio.
Michael Calore: Right. So yeah, Clubhouse, you went into a room and there were people talking in the room and you could put your hand up and speak, but mostly it was just centered around listening and maybe participating in an actual live conversation.
Lauren Goode: Right. And Twitter now has that too.
Michael Calore: Yes, everybody has it.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, they've had some well-known technical difficulties in the past. Alan, what's been your experience on Airchat?
Alan Henry: It's more or less the same. So, it's been interesting because the first thing I saw upon redeeming my invite and joining Airchat was a post at the very top of the screen that said, "Hi everybody, let's make each other happy with our mouths today." And I nearly just … I mean, you know that meme of the guy that kind of walks in with the pizzas and everything's on fire. And I'm kind of like, "Well, OK, this is what I signed up for." It's strange. It's such a weird app and I'm of two minds of it. On the one hand, everything you just said is exactly true and real, and it's literally if you don't listen to the posts, it feels like I'm reading someone's stream of consciousness because it's transcribing what people say and the way we talk is different than the way we write.
So I see a lot of things that are just people kind of rambling on and on about, I don't know, "Hi, good morning," or, "Let's have a great day," or something like that. And then that's interspersed with the people who are like, "I'd like to welcome the CTO of X company to Airchat," and, "Oh, so-and-so redeemed my invite, welcome this person to Airchat." The person who invited me said, "Oh, when you join just fill out your profile and I'll introduce you." And I was like, "I need an introduction on a social network?" She never did do that intro by the way, so I'm just kind hanging out over here.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, you were like, I just want to lurk.
Alan Henry: And I mean for the most part I have been lurking and it's just so strange. It's such a combination of very obviously Silicon Valley conversations. I mean, I've just learned late in the day yesterday that there are topics you can follow. They're kind of like channels almost, but not really because you see them interspersed with the main feed. But I mean, the channels are so clearly … This app is built in Silicon Valley for people who are from Silicon Valley. Some of the topics include effective accelerationism and crypto.
Michael Calore: Oh, cryptocurrency? People talk about cryptocurrency?
Alan Henry: Oh yeah, there's crypto talk, but there's also the normal stuff. Cats, dogs, politics.
Lauren Goode: Relationships.
Alan Henry: Critical rationalism.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, it's a weird intersection of topics.
Alan Henry: It is.
Lauren Goode: I would say it's a dichotomy of both Silicon Valley mundanity and then Hype Beast stuff, but it is not just a couple different types of content. It's all out there. Like Alan was describing, one of the first things I saw was Garry Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator saying that a breakfast is like, I'm paraphrasing, "What makes people successful and what did everyone have for breakfast today?" And then someone responds like, "Bacon and eggs." And I'm like, "Wow, this is early Twitter. What am I having for lunch?" Then shortly afterwards I stumbled upon one of the channels that was just called War and it had over 500 members in it, and the conversations ranged from Iran's recent drone strike attempt on Israel, the war in Gaza, the genocide in Gaza, US-China tensions, Russia and Ukraine.
It really ran the gamut and there were a lot of strong opinions and quote-unquote people doing their own research. Someone did say sort of snarkily in that channel, "Yes, more VCs posting about geopolitics." It definitely had that feeling of people are also discussing this on Twitter and Threads right now, and you sort of don't know what to trust and it gets very noisy very quickly.
Michael Calore: I see. Well, before we take a break, Lauren, I know there's some interesting pedigree with this app, like who the founders are. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Lauren Goode: Yeah, good question. So one of the founders is Brian Norgard. He is a former chief product officer at Tinder. He was there for several years and the app actually launched sometime last year without much fanfare. And then another person came in, Naval Ravikant, and he's the founder of AngelList and he's got a long-standing reputation in Silicon Valley for being an entrepreneur and investor.
I saw one person describe him as kind of a philosopher type in Silicon Valley, and he told me in an Airchat that he joined a couple of months ago. The app had pivoted twice, and he also funded the app and became kind of the driving force behind its relaunch just last weekend. And he is the person who has been responding to a lot of the inquiries within the app, both to journalists like myself and Dave Lee from BBC, asked a couple of questions and others are chiming in, but just users.
And it's kind of interesting how he's been responding. I tried to DM him and he politely responded and said, "Let's take this to the public channel because talking in DMs is the old world and this is the new world." And then he kind of compelled me to leave these thirsty voice notes for him asking him questions in front of everyone, which is fine, but it was asynchronous. And then the conversation got really interesting and we should talk about that in the next … And we should talk about that.
Michael Calore: OK, that's a good place to take a break. Let's come right back and we'll get into it.
[Break]
Michael Calore: So Airchat creates almost real time transcripts of your voice once you post a voice note and based on our observations so far, those transcripts are pretty good, even useful. As journalists, we work with transcripts a lot and they're also really important for people who rely on language translation or for people who can't necessarily hear voice notes because of a disability. But of course, all of that transcription is done using machine learning and artificial intelligence, and since we're living in a world now where data is being scraped all the time to build powerful AI models, it is absolutely worth asking what Airchat is going to do with all of this voice data that is being uploaded into their app. So Lauren, you asked the founder this question on Airchat.
Lauren Goode: That was my only option just to keep the Airchat voice notes flowing. Yeah, there were a couple different layers to this. He did say that Airchat might use voice notes and transcriptions to improve their own app, which is something that we hear quite a bit now with apps that are using AI. Sometimes you can opt in, sometimes you can opt out. This just seems that once you use the app, you're in it. He also said that he doesn't plan to sell Airchat data to outside entities that are building LLMs. And then I asked, "Well, what if they just scrape it anyway?" Because to your point, that's what's happening on the internet these days. And he had this kind of funny response, which is just basically, "If I had satellites in orbit, I would nuke them."
And then, a reporter from Bloomberg followed up to that question and he had gone through the terms of service of Airchat and basically said to Naval Ravikant again in a voice chat, "It looks like you guys can do anything with this data. That's what the TOS says. And even if you're not giving away this data now for others to make AI models with them, you could potentially in the future." And Naval Ravikant basically said, "Look …" This is where it gets a little interesting. "Look, terms and conditions are written by lawyers and chatGBT these days. So you going through a magnifying glass right now isn't useful when I've got a product to build, I've got code to write."
It was a very tech entrepreneur type response and then he basically said, "Settle down." I'm glad he wasn't saying or writing this to me because yeah, and he said, "If you're a person who gets your knickers in a bunch over terms of service, then just don't use the app." It was amazingly unconcerned with the reporter's question. So Naval so far as the founder of Airchat is someone who is both very responsive to questions in this app and remarkably glib, and these are real concerns that people have right now about AI.
Michael Calore: Yeah. Alan, what do you think? Everything that … Well see, you haven't spoken into the app much yet, but once you do, do you think that everything is just going to be used to train LLMs?
Alan Henry: Yes. I mean, I both respect that response, right? Because on some level he's not wrong.
Lauren Goode: Right.
Alan Henry: TOSs and things are written by lawyers to give you the most possible runway to do whatever you want to keep this business alive. I get it, I get it. And yet, two things can be true as my therapist always tells me. But also, I mean, I look at this and I think about how good the transcription is and I'm like, some company is going to make a bid for this and they're going to buy it up and they're going to keep it running and they're going to use it to train an LLM or train some other model. And then at that point he's like, "Well, I'm trying to build a company." Yeah, we get it. What's this company going to do is the question we're trying to get to.
It's just one of those things where as I look through the app, I mean, granted, I'm so removed from Silicon Valley vibes and culture, but I still kind of understand a little bit of it that I see that this is for a very specific kind of person that is disconnected from, I don't know, the first thing that comes to mind is Walmart just settled a class action lawsuit because their cash registers were overweighing groceries. You know what I mean? That's not a conversation that's going to happen in Airchat. It's just not. The people in there are not those people who were interested in having that conversation. So that's fine, but let's not pretend that the app is something that it's not. Right? Someone's going to want this data and they're going to offer you enough money to get it.
Lauren Goode: Right. It's a build-build-build mindset-
Alan Henry: Absolutely.
Lauren Goode: … that we observe and write about a lot in Silicon Valley and the people who are on this app so far are tech enthusiasts, early adopters, VCs, journalists like us who cover this. You're right, Alan. It's like there are probably some channels and some conversation that are happening there that are interested in the rights of consumers, the rights of the laypeople. Not the early adopters, the people who are just like, "Hey," the old saying, "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product," right? Fundamentally, the people who are the training data for this, but right now the cacophony of voices is kind of concentrated on the people who are like, "Yeah, new thing, let's do it." Hop aboard.
Michael Calore: And given that audience, and also given the fact that the app is invite only right now, it may not seem to the community that something like moderation is a huge priority. I don't know how they feel about moderation or how they're looking at moderation, but sooner or later when it opens up to the wide world, they're going to have to start moderating the conversations in a way that they don't have to really moderate when it's a bunch of people who work in the tech industry. So, how do the moderation tools feel now? What sorts of things can you do? What sorts of things can't you do? And what does the next year of moderation on Airchat look like?
Alan Henry: I mean, that's a great question. I mean, I'm going to look at the app right now again, just to make sure. You can block people, you can mute people, but as far as I can tell, that's it. Right? You can't do too much else. And now granted, I'm using the app on Android, which I don't know if there are any substantial differences between the Android version and the iOS version, but that's about it. You don't really get to, there's no muting, there's no keyword muting, there's no topic filtration, there's no anything like that. I mean, I don't even think you can directly report users.
Lauren Goode: I haven't seen the direct reporting then. That's a really good question. I haven't looked into that.
Alan Henry: Yeah, I don't think you can. You can block and mute a user, but you can't do anything else. And I mean, I guess that's fine when you are a nascent social network because the eternal September comes for all of us, and eventually you're just going to get people in who are going to say wild things and what is going to stop someone from, I mean, other than the invite trail, joining Airchat and posting a really, really immediately transcribed odious manifesto something. I mean, of course, just looking at the app, and I understand the challenges of moderating social network … I'm a big blue sky person, so I've watched that network go from no moderation to some moderation to community-based moderation, but I don't see anything like that happening here.
I think that Airchat is going to probably wind up being yet another app that pretends to have no values. That's like, "Oh, well, we don't want to … Freedom of speech and everything, and we're not going to take anybody's voices away, including the Nazis and the other people over there that are calling for your death. I mean, I'm so sorry that they are, but …" I don't have too much faith. I really, really don't. In some level, I think that's OK at this stage because I love that the future of social media seems to be the smaller, more concentrated networks of people who actually do want to talk to each other as opposed to people who don't, but just want to fight.
And I do like that that's kind of how we seem to be trending as opposed to kind of the big outsized power that a lot of the big platforms have had. People are starting to realize that, "Wow, that's a lot of influence you have on my life and my feelings," but you can't run a business that way. You can't chase scale and also say, "I want to be a small gated neighborhood where everybody who comes in is somebody I know, understands me, us, and is going to have a good time." Those two things just don't match.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, in the short time that I've been on it, I've seen some content that's pretty questionable, and I wonder if those people are actually just pushing the boundaries to see what the content moderation policy is. The company's stated policy is that it's kind of one person for themselves, that you have autonomy to mute or block, but they're not taking a widespread platform up or platform down approach yet. The stuff that I saw included a couple of people engaging in a conversation about gay Jewish teens, and they seemed to very intentionally be doing it. They were just volleying back and forth.
And so, I suspect those people were kind of red teaming the moderation policies. Another person seemed legitimately irate at the founders and was dropping F-bombs at them and calling them out and demanding that they perform fellatio, which is the most polite way I will say this on the podcast, you know what it means. And so, that person I checked a day or two later and that voice note was still up. The way that Naval described it actually in a DM to me, is that he envisions this being a little bit like a dinner party or a Parisian salon where there are going to be people who are at the dinner, are at the salon, and they might say things that are offensive or that you don't like, and you may ask them to leave, but there's no kind of overarching rules at the door.
And I don't believe these founders, I don't believe he's a sweet summer child who doesn't understand how this works. So I wouldn't say it's naive. It's something. It's a choice right now, and it is while the network is small, and if it does happen to grow and doesn't flame out, then content moderation is going to become an extremely thorny issue for them.
Michael Calore: Right. OK. Well, best of luck with that strategy to the folks at Airchat.
Lauren Goode: Right. Yeah. I would love to be a fly on the wall of their Parisian salon.
Michael Calore: I'm just waiting for an invite. I have to say that Alan, you're not the co-host of a tech podcast at Wired, and yet you got an invite. I'm still waiting on mine, so when I do get invited, I would love it if you would introduce me.
Alan Henry: I will, absolutely. I follow through on introducing you.
Lauren Goode: Thank you, maybe? Also, the app seems to be going in and out of invite only mode. They closed it down and then they opened it up again briefly for iOS, and then they closed, so I don't know. Yeah, I don't know.
Michael Calore: Well, we'll see. Nobody ever wants me in their party anyway.
Lauren Goode: No, that's not true.
Michael Calore: The first thing I do is pair my phone to the Bluetooth speaker when I show up to parties.
Lauren Goode: Oh, let me tell you about that. He did that at my house once. All of a sudden Enya was playing and I was chatting, chatting, chatting with people and my ears, I was like, is this Enya—
Michael Calore: The answer is yes.
Lauren Goode: … that's playing on the speaker?
Michael Calore: It is Enya.
Alan Henry: That sounds fantastic. That's the start of a great party.
Michael Calore: Right?
Lauren Goode: Never let Mike take over your Bluetooth.
Michael Calore: OK. Well, Mike is going to take over the conversation at this point and say that we are going to take another break and come right back with our recommendations.
[Break]
Michael Calore: OK. We've reached the third part of our episode where we go around the room and we each give recommendations for things our listeners might enjoy. Alan, you get to go first. What's your recommendation?
Alan Henry: My recommendation is a YouTube channel called Kurzgesagt—In a Nutshell. I love them. I can't believe I haven't mentioned them before, but I buy their calendar every year. They are just a bunch of guys in Germany who have been making explanatory videos about everything from what space travel would actually be like and how far the observable universe actually stretches and whether wormholes are possible things. I know it's a lot of space science, I'm saying, but that's just my background. There's more. They do other things too.
Lauren Goode: What else do they do?
Alan Henry: I mean, they also, they had a whole series on how your body's immune system works at the microscopic level, and I've never thought of my body as a constantly raging battlefield before, but now I do, and it makes me feel kind of cool. On some level my body is at combat readiness at all times.
Michael Calore: Wow.
Alan Henry: I mean, including when I'm on the couch eating pizza, which is wild to me. But anyway, they're a great YouTube channel. They do these videos, I think about once a week. They have a store too, which they have lots of cool little posters about Stellar. They just launched a poster about Stellar Evolution, which is I am the target audience for that. No one else, but how stars develop from proto stars to end of their lives. I'm the only person who cares about that, but it's OK because I'm going to buy that poster. So anyway, YouTube channel, check it out. It's really cool.
Lauren Goode: What are the posters or the calendar like?
Alan Henry: The posters are usually pretty big and heavy quality, very, very nice. But the calendar I've been getting for a long time, the thing I love about the calendar is that this year is 2024, so to them the calendar is the human era, 12,024. They add 10,000 years because it's like a calendar that goes all the way back to the beginning of the agricultural age. So the extent of human history, about additional 12,000 years. A couple years ago, their whole calendar was archeology. Last year, their calendar was all the microscopic world. This year, it's all exoplanets and space science, so it's pretty neat.
Michael Calore: Wow.
Alan Henry: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: That's really cool.
Michael Calore: It's extremely WIRED.
Lauren Goode: It's so WIRED. I know, as I'm saying, "That's really cool," I'm thinking, "That's so nerd-tastic."
Michael Calore: Yes.
Alan Henry: Yeah.
Michael Calore: That's what we specialize in here.
Lauren Goode: That's right.
Michael Calore: I mean, we just spent however long talking about an audio only invite, only social networking app for nerds.
Lauren Goode: But everyone commuting in their cars right now really appreciates this.
Michael Calore: True. Thank you for that, Alan. That's lovely.
Alan Henry: Of course.
Lauren Goode: Thanks, Alan.
Alan Henry: Thank you.
Michael Calore: Lauren, what is your recommendation?
Lauren Goode: I have two. One is our colleague Julian's review of the Humane AI Pin. If you haven't been following the other drama in Silicon Valley this week, it's reviews of the Humane AI Pin. Marques Brownlee, a well-known YouTuber who's got something like 18 million followers, really good at his job, hugely influential, panned it. Just totally killed the Humane AI Pin, and people are having a very strong reaction to that. Julian, our colleague, wrote a fantastic review as well. It's a good thoughtful read. He also gave it a four out of 10, and the reason why it's good is because he's doing a consumer service for you. He is telling you, you should probably not spend $700 on the first iteration of this product, which is what our jobs are as reviewers. So check that out.
And my second recommendation is the movie Scoop on Netflix. A friend recommended it last week. I enjoyed it. It's the inside story of how a BBC team of producers managed to get the now infamous interview with Prince Andrew in the wake of the Epstein scandal.
Michael Calore: Wow.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. And so, as a journalist, I appreciated it, seeing inside the newsroom, and it's a bit dramatized. Journalism movies always have that same kind of arc where, look, it's a bunch of people sitting at their desks making calls. It's a hard thing to make interesting. And yet, and then there's a little bit of patting on the back at the end. We got the story, we got the scoop, but still it's a great watch.
Michael Calore: That's awesome.
Lauren Goode: Yeah.
Michael Calore: That is cool. So does it go up there with other great recent journalism movies, like She Said and Spotlight?
Lauren Goode: It's not at the level of Spotlight. It's not at the level of All the President's Men.
Michael Calore: Maybe more like Frost/Nixon?
Lauren Goode: Oh, I remember Frost/Nixon. Yeah, I think I covered that for The Wall Street Journal. I'm trying to remember. I remember, yeah, I remember interviewing, I interviewed, oh my God, Ron Howard about it.
Michael Calore: Now, that's an assignment.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, right. Oh my God.
Michael Calore: Write a story about a movie, about a television show.
Lauren Goode: Right, very meta media. This whole thing is so meta media. I'm like, read the story, then also go to the YouTube review about the thing that people are reacting to on Twitter and also Airchat it. But yes, those are my recommendations.
Michael Calore: Scoop on Netflix.
Lauren Goode: Scoop on Netflix.
Michael Calore: Nice.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. What's your recommendation, Mike?
Michael Calore: So, I'm going to recommend that everybody check out WIRED’s new podcast. And this is not self-dealing or anything like that. I mean, it is, yes, technically, but I listened to it. It's called WIRED Politics Lab. I listened to it because I introduced it on our feed last week, and it is excellent. It's very good. It's a brand new podcast. We just launched it. We have a politics team. They're covering the 2024 election here in the United States where we will be selecting a president and we'll be determining who controls Congress, and we'll be passing all kinds of laws at the state and local level.
And of course, it's an extremely online election, and there's a bunch of shenanigans. There is disinformation, there's voter disenfranchisement, there are ads made by AI that might be deep fakes and might not. So it's very juicy and it's extremely fun. Most of the time I just can't listen to politics stuff because it just drives me batty, but this is not one of those kinds of shows. It's about the technology and the data scraping and the bad actors out there who are doing the work to try to influence the election, and it's also about the election itself. So, I can't recommend it highly enough. If you have room in your brain for another politics podcast, this is the one to add, WIRED Politics Lab. And I love that they went with Lab with the name.
Lauren Goode: That's right. We're keeping it consistent here. And tell us what the first episode is about.
Michael Calore: The first episode is about voter rights issues and how companies are using technology to try to get people off voter rolls and to make tools that make it easy for local political organizations to challenge people's right to vote. The second episode is about RFK Jr. and his platform and all of the conspiracies that he believes in. So it was, yeah, it's good stuff.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, I really enjoyed the first one with Leah, Leah Fieger, and David Gilbert and Tori Elliott and Makena Kelly is a part of that team as well.
Michael Calore: Yep. So if you've listened to the show for a while, you will recognize some of the people who are on Politics Lab. And if you listened to our feed last week, you heard the first episode when I introduced it, so definitely go subscribe. It's a great time. All right, well, that is our show for this week. Alan, thanks for joining us again.
Alan Henry: Always. Thanks for having me. I will happily come back anytime.
Michael Calore: Great.
Lauren Goode: And can I just give a quick shout out, by the way, to our excellent producer, Boone Ashworth, who we thank every week, but I want to give him a special thank you because we're currently in a new studio. We just moved offices at WIRED. We had to basically rebuild the podcast studio from scratch. And when I say we, I really mean Arthur, our amazing colleague, but Boone and you, Mike, who just put this podcast studio together in about a day. So, thanks to you guys. And right now we're in the library actually, so we're staring at this amazing assortment of old WIRED spines. And those of you who are longtime subscribers know the spines are a trademark feature of WIRED. It's super cool.
Michael Calore: Yep, it's very colorful.
Lauren Goode: It's a great room.
Michael Calore: Thanks.
Lauren Goode: So thanks guys.
Michael Calore: Of course. We do it for the pod. Do it all for the pod. All right, well, thank you all for listening. If you have feedback, you can bark at all of us on Airchat. Just check the show notes. No DMs, we have to talk in public. Our producer, as Lauren just mentioned, is the excellent Boone Ashworth. We will be back next week with a new show. And until then, goodbye.
[Gadget Lab outro theme music plays]
Michael Calore: I LOL-ed.
Lauren Goode: Look, no judging, OK?
Michael Calore: I LOL-ed—
Alan Henry: And LOL-ed. You LOL-ed IRL.
Michael Calore: I did.
Alan Henry: But did you LMAO?
Michael Calore: I didn't LMAO. I went, "Ha!" OK, let's record some content.
Lauren Goode: OK.
Michael Calore: OK. Here's the—
[He stops suddenly, sighs heavily, and everyone laughs.]
