‘Uncanny Valley’: Iran’s Threats on US Tech, Trump’s Plans for Midterms, and Polymarket’s Pop-up Flop | WIRED

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The team is back this week to discuss how top US tech companies are increasingly finding themselves as targets in the ongoing war with Iran. They also give an inside view into how Polymarket’s pop-up bar in DC went sideways. Plus, our hosts go through the steps that the Trump administration is taking to control the upcoming midterm elections.

Articles mentioned in this episode:

- Iran Threatens to Start Attacking Major US Tech Firms on April 1

- Polymarket’s Coming-Out Party in Washington Was a Disaster

- This Is How Trump Is Already Threatening the Midterms

You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett, Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer, and Leah Feiger on Bluesky at @leahfeiger. Write to us at [email protected].

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Brian Barrett: Hey, it's Brian. Zoë, Leah, and I have really enjoyed being your new hosts these past few weeks, and we want to hear from you. If you like the show and have a minute, please leave us a review in the podcast or app of your choice. It really helps us reach more people, and for any questions and comments, you can always reach us at [email protected]. Thank you for listening. On to the show.

Zoë Schiffer: Leah, did you make it to Chicago?

Leah Feiger: Honestly, barely. I have spent more time in airports in the last three days than I care to admit.

Brian Barrett: You told me yesterday that you were excited to be flying out of Newark instead of the other—which is the first time I've heard that.

Leah Feiger: I was young when I said that.

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

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

Leah Feiger: And I'm Leah Feiger, senior politics editor.

Zoë Schiffer: This week on the show, we have a pretty well-rounded episode for you all. A little bit of international politics as Iran threatens to target US tech firms. There's also election news as we're tracking Trump's attempts to control the midterms, and a scene report from our DC colleague who had the great assignment of hitting up the Polymarket pop-up bar, which was a bit of a Fyre Fest situation.

Brian Barrett: To let people in behind the scenes of the magic of the Uncanny Valley podcast, we're recording this on a Wednesday. It's going to come out on Thursday. That's the magic. So, things could happen between then, but on this Wednesday, yesterday, Tuesday, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned that it planned to begin attacking more than a dozen American companies across the Middle East. If more of Iran's leaders are killed during the ongoing war, they'd made this threat before, but what was different is that they set a deadline to it. They said on April 1st, we are going to start targeting companies in these regions. There are 18 total companies on that. They actually gave a list. On that list include Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta, IBM, Tesla, Palantir, a bunch more. As of now, that hasn't happened other than an attack that we can talk about later that sort of affects Amazon Web Services. But it does seem to be another one of these escalations. And I'm really curious what is going on with these companies, what obligations they have to their employees to protect them, what it means for all kinds of investment in that region, which has been increasingly important. It feels like it opens up a lot of serious questions. Regardless of whether these attacks go through—hopefully they don't—but it's really an escalatory time.

Leah Feiger: I was pretty struck by parts of this where, you know, calling on employees of these tech firms in the region to distance themselves from workplaces, for residents living near offices of these companies to move away to a safe place, this is a very serious warning. And so much to me reminds us that what's happening here, this war that is very much becoming a war with a capital W is not Trump's childhood wars. We are in a globalized world where he is not going to be able to remove himself from the blowback if American companies are indeed attacked. This is very different than military. This is an impact that I think would be very hard to escape from beyond the fact that it's horrible, it's sad. These are people's lives.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I mean, we reached out to every company on the list. It turns out