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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
We’re Living in a World Created by the Iraq War
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We’re Living in a World Created by the Iraq War
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- [00:00]
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- [01:16]
Evan Osnos
Welcome to the political scene. I'm Evan Osnos, and I'm joined by my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser. This week marks the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. It's a milestone that can feel both far away and utter. In our lives, Susan and Jane and I have all spent time writing and reporting on the Iraq war and its legacy. And this anniversary has us all thinking about the profound and in many ways overlooked effects of that war. Whether we're talking about the rise of Donald Trump or the growing debate about America's role in the war in Ukraine, or the widespread distrust of experts, we are living in a world that the Iraq war created. So on this episode, we're gonna look at how that war changed our country and the world and the lessons that we might glean from it. But I wanna start at the beginning with each of you, on where you were, what you were doing, and how this intersected with your life. Susan, start with you.
- [02:15]
Susan Glasser
Well, Evan, you know, I'm thinking about how you and I met each other, which was basically in Kuwait. While waiting for this war and that's where I was on the day the war started in Kuwait, at the. What became the headquarters hotel of the US Military for the war. I will never forget sitting there on the breakfast cafe, which was right on the sand. You know, there were, like, literally, like Gurkhas marching across the sand from the British military there. We were sitting there, and we were with our mutual friend Ed Gargan, a legendary correspondent, and he was a link to the Vietnam era, and he had a very different perspective on the war. He was also sort of a prankster. And he's sitting there, and these young American soldiers sit down next to us in full combat regalia, which was extremely surreal. And Ed starts saying, give me a Q, give me a U. Give me an A, give me a G. And he spells out quagmire. And I was like, ed, you're gonna get us in big trouble. You know, those people have guns sitting next to us. What are you talking about? And the truth is, is that I didn't really see it. I wasn't convinced. And, you know, the Iraq war was many things, but it also was sort of a death of innocence and a sort of naivete that I think I. And many people had about, you know, that the US Government can't possibly be this wrong. And, of course, they turned out in many assumptions to be that wrong. But, you know, Ed, I think because he had come out of the Vietnam War era, he was more right than many of the rest of us.
- [04:05]
Evan Osnos
You know, what's fascinating is by the time the war started, I had embedded with a Marine infantry unit. And so I was sort of surrounded by these very young. I mean, as I remember, there was a general who came and talked to us on the sort of eve of the invasion. And he said, remember the word infantry has the word infant in it, because it has always been about old men sending young men to fight and die. And there was something quite kind of bracing about that comment. And this unit went into Iraq. We're kind of rolling along, and I was in what was called an amphibious assault vehicle. It's a kind of Marine tin can. And there was this moment. I mean, this seems like the most trivial detail, but I was standing next to a young Marine who was. You know, he's holding his weapon. We're standing in the open top of this vehicle, and we're driving along, and there's just trash everywhere. Because war creates debris and detritus, and some of it is war material, and some of it is just trash. And he just says kind of almost to nobody. Under his breath, I guess you can litter in war. And what I realize about that is this was the, you know, they'd been training for this, but there's nothing like the encounter with the actual events that suddenly scraps absolutely every plan that you had or as we discovered later, reveal that you had no plan at all. Jane, where were you at that moment that this was all unfolding?
- [05:31]
Jane Mayer
Well, so the salient memory I have was at a then Redskins football game, and I was in the bleachers with the top brass of the Washington Post, and I asked them, what do you think is right on the. Right on the eve of the invasion? And I won't name names, but they said, the one thing we know is the Iraqi people are gonna be so happy when we come in. They're gonna be dancing. Do you remember? There was gonna be a cakewalk. It was gonna be just so much. We were rescuing them. And there was this incredible rah rah spirit in Washington that we were the good guys going to save, you know, bring democracy to the heathens, basically, and liberate the Iraqis. And they were absolutely certain, absolutely certain this was the right thing to do at the top of the Washington Post. And then very soon after that, one of the people who was cheering them on was my wonderful colleague Michael Kelly, who was a reporter for the New Yorker and then had gone to the Atlantic. A beautiful writer, incredibly wonderful guy, and he was just so excited about this invasion that he got himself over there right away. And very soon after he was killed.
- [06:55]
Evan Osnos
Yeah, yeah, Susan.
- [06:56]
Susan Glasser
I met Michael Kelly there, actually, Jane, but to the point about the disconnect between Washington and Ground Truth, which in many ways is, of course, the meta experience of any foreign correspondent. I ran right into the buzzsaw of that false expectation, literally on the first day of the war. And I, just before we came here, I just reread the story that I did, because what happened after breakfast in the hotel is that we decided we were supposed to be the unembedded journalists, the unilateral journalists is what they called us. We were not going to be with the American military. Our job was, was to go see the Iraqi people who were going to be greeting us with flowers and parades and welcoming their liberators. And so I and a group of other correspondents, we literally had rental cars from the Kuwait airport and we assembled our own little mini convoy. And we decided basically one day into the war we were going to try to drive up to the border and drive on our own across the border so that we could report on the liberation that we would surely see well after. After various adventures, leaving in the middle of the night, and we snuck across a border. We made it to the first town on the border, which is called Safwan. And, you know, Jane, not only was there no parades, but we were shocked to find children stoning the military vehicles, crowds of anxious, unhappy people screaming. They were screaming for water and electricity. And that became actually the mantra for. For the entire time that I was in reporting in southern Iraq for the next couple of months. Water and electricity. They were angry. They felt betrayed. These were Shiites who felt that George H.W. bush had encouraged them to rise up against Saddam Hussein and then had not been there when they did. So many of them said they had family members who were killed. And we saw that there was no plan, that the US Just had no idea what it was doing. And the headline that the Washington Post put on that story was, was, US Military Brings Instability in Its Wake. And actually, at the end of the day, it was so unsafe. And a film crew drove down the road toward Basra and was shot, a British film crew. We retreated back across the border, and we stayed there for the next couple weeks.
- [09:18]
Evan Osnos
There was this moment right after the unit that I was with got to Baghdad. We arrived on the day that this famous statue of Saddam fell, and the units kind of encamped on the grounds, just in the outdoors, on the campus of Baghdad University. I remember the next morning, there was this meeting among the Marines, and we're sort of at the platoon level. It's about as close to the ground as you can get. And there was this almost bizarre moment when the officers told the Marines, all right, from now on, we're going to be like policemen. And it was like the sudden realization that their job had flipped overnight, that instead of being the, quote, unquote, liberators, they were now going to be the ones governing the nation of Iraq. And it was. Everybody was just sort of paralyzed by the discovery of this entirely different life ahead. And I think it was a reminder of how absolutely unprepared everybody really was.
- [10:21]
Jane Mayer
It was the reality of what General Colin Powell had warned, which was the Pottery Barn theory. You break it, you break it, you own it.
- [10:30]
Evan Osnos
Jane, you wrote extensively about one of the most shocking outgrowths of this period, which was a dark saga in American politics, which was the embrace of what you can only describe as torture. And it was an outgrowth of 9, 11. But you see it in Guantanamo and in other places. How do you think about how that came to be how the decisions were made to embrace that and ultimately what the effect was on American politics?
- [10:59]
Jane Mayer
Well, I mean, the decisions were made in dark secrecy. They were pushed to a large extent by Vice President Cheney, who talked about the need to work on the dark side in secret. And they pushed the American government outside the law. They very specifically and purposely held detainees outside of the law, outside of international law, outside of the Constitution, and instituted a basically medieval torture regime in order to try to interrogate them. And it was shameful. And when you talk about the hangover from the Iraq war, I think you have to factor in the damage to the United States image as an upholder of human rights. When the pictures came out from places like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and, you know, it's done lasting damage to us, I think.
- [11:56]
Evan Osnos
I remember being in Baghdad when the pictures from Abu Ghraib came out, and it was like almost instantaneously a change in the way that the Iraqis I knew imagined the United States thought of them. I mean, it was like something that you could not undo. And Susan hinted a moment ago at the impact on Iraqis and the way this was reverberating through their society. You know, we've since now kind of developed this accounting for what happened. I mean, at Brown University, for instance, they've tallied up what they estimate to be about between 275,000 and 306,000 Iraqi deaths since this war began. Jane, how do you think about the impact on Iraq?
- [12:38]
Jane Mayer
Well, honestly, I think the first thing you have to say is we don't think about it enough and that the, you know, we go in, break the pottery and leave and leave behind a lot of destruction. I mean, that's a tremendous number of human beings who were killed in that war. Compare it to, what was it, 50,000Americans in the Vietnam War. And you have to then add onto it that if you add the deaths that resulted from the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Syria and Yemen, all of which sort of became, you know, part of this huge morass, you get up to about 929,000 people who've died in these wars. So it's a broken promise, really. I mean, and we've left a broken country.
- [13:29]
Evan Osnos
Susan, how do you take stock of.
- [13:30]
Susan Glasser
That legacy when we're talking about Iraq itself? What's interesting is that it is still what you might call a very tenuous emerging democracy. And they just had another election. It took a full year after the election for a new government to be formed. It has struggled throughout this 20 year period with the consequences of having a much more powerful neighbor in Iran that has exercised an undue amount of influence over Iraq in the time since. So it's been a very unstable democracy. And of course, there was the terrible, essentially second phase of the war, which was the rise of ISIS and the near takeover by ISIS and the Islamic State of Iraq during President Obama's tenure. And that was, I think, a real crisis, a shock even. And so it's remarkable in that sense that there is a functioning government. It still continues to be a US Partner, although it's a very uncomfortable relationship. Lloyd Austin, the US Secretary of Defense, was actually just there last week. The United States, by the way, has 2,500 troops still remaining there for counterterrorism mission to make sure that the remnants of the Islamic State do not threaten the government of Iraq. Again, it's an important, if you look at it geographically, this is a very important country in the region. So, you know, it hasn't returned to a Saddam style dictatorship. That's, I think, something significant and its legacy in many ways. And we'll talk about that. To my mind, it has been here in the United States as well as in the Middle east that you have seen really years and years, a rewriting of our politics as a result of this almost catastrophic failure on the part of the US Government.
- [15:23]
Jane Mayer
We're not looking at the liberation of France in World War II. I mean, this is not a success story. And that then reverberates at home where everybody is asking, well, what did we get for those lives we lost and for those lives we took? And I think it has, you know, cast a huge shadow that we're still living in in terms of foreign policy policy and in terms of trust in our government and our intelligence.
- [15:46]
Evan Osnos
I want to zero in on exactly that. I think, Jane, you've hit on what.
- [15:49]
Jane Mayer
Made me and in the press, which of course, as you know, as that Washington Post anecdote shows, led sort of the cheering section in many ways.
- [15:58]
Evan Osnos
Well, so this is, if you had to identify one of the most enduring outcomes of this. It is a fundamental change in the relationship between the public and what we would call the establishment, which encompasses both the press and the government and just people in a position of authority who were sort of making the big choices in American public life. There was, for people, of course, who don't remember, there was this broadly embraced argument that the United States was searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. This was sort of the core of the administration's case. It was made by Colin Powell at the United nations, and over and over again by administration officials who essentially made it sound like it was a fait accompli. Indeed, the facts and Iraq's behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.
- [16:54]
Jane Mayer
There is no doubt that he is.
- [16:56]
Evan Osnos
Amassing them to use against our friends.
- [16:59]
Jane Mayer
Against our allies, and against us.
- [17:01]
Evan Osnos
As we all know, of course, there were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq. And in some ways, I think, Susan, the establishment was permanently injured in the American perception as a result of that. When you go back now and you look at the mistakes that were made in judgment on the part of the press, on the part of others, how do you think about those errors? What went wrong in the process of evaluating the war in Iraq?
- [17:28]
Susan Glasser
It was a colossal failure in many ways of imagination as well as a much more mundane failure of basic process. And, you know, historians have begun and really have honed in on something that I think is very significant. I'm biased here. My husband, Peter Baker, wrote a pretty definitive book on the Bush and Cheney administration called Days of Fire. That reporting has been backed up in a new book by a diplomatic historian from the University of Virginia, Mel Loeffler, who's just done another history. Look at this. And here's the stunning thing. There was never a moment in this run up to war where President Bush convened his National Security Cabinet and went around the room and they actually had a decision meeting. They literally just sort of stumbled into it. It became a sort of inevitability. There was never a moment. There were qualms, there were concerns, there were questions. Colin Powell was famously uncomfortable. He challenged some of the intelligence, but then walked away pronouncing himself satisfied enough to give that famous and incorrect speech.
- [18:36]
Evan Osnos
This is evidence, not conjecture. This is true.
- [18:40]
Susan Glasser
This is all well documented at the United Nations. And so one of the lessons is, you know, when you're dealing with life and death consequences, you better make sure that you have both the personnel around you who are willing to say tough things to you, who are willing to make tough choices, who are willing to fight it out. And also this question of what are the assumptions that underpin intelligence? And I do think that the world is much more skeptical about that. I think you can see and discern the consequences of this long range Iraq syndrome. And why was it that many of our US Allies and partners were so skeptical when the US Put out intelligence last year that the Russians were on the brink of invading its neighbor Ukraine. And there was this enormous amount of intelligence and an enormous amount of skepticism in Western Europe and in Ukraine itself, even here. I remember being interviewed on a radio show by a very prominent liberal host literally the day before this invasion occurred in February of 2022. And the guy said, well, how can we believe this U.S. intelligence? You know, why should we believe this? You know, I mean, we've been wrong before. 20 years ago in Iraq. And I could not persuade this guy, literally, as Putin was ordering the troops in. And the reason that he cited was the failure of US Intelligence back at the run up to the Iraq war.
- [20:07]
Jane Mayer
It may very well have played a part in why the Biden administration took a step that hadn't been taken before and released the intelligence in a way that was so much more visible. I mean, they moved away from the traditional stance, which is trust us, because people. People didn't trust them. They had to actually put out a lot of intelligence. And it's been very interesting to see that.
- [20:31]
Susan Glasser
And in general, this issue of assumptions, I mean, we are all writing about Washington in many ways, right? We're writing about the government, we're writing about how political officials intersect with the permanent national security bureaucracy. And I just think that Iraq, kind of like Vietnam before it, again, is this incredible case study and cautionary tale about what it takes to oversee this vast amount of information that's coming in and that you have to not only sift through, but that the stories that we tell ourselves are too often the stories that we want to see and the information laid out before us.
- [21:13]
Jane Mayer
And that's confirmation bias.
- [21:15]
Susan Glasser
And that's true for us as journalists, too.
- [21:17]
Evan Osnos
Part of it also comes down to the experiences of the people who are making those choices. And in the specific sense of the invasion of Iraq, it's amazing to look back and realize how few people who were involved in making those choices in Congress or in the administration actually had a connection to the military. There's this incredibly sort of prophetic column that Mark Shields wrote. He was the late great columnist and commentator Many people who listen to this program will remember. Mark tended to be right on a lot of things. And one of the things he was right about in the run up to Iraq, he had been a Marine himself, and he looked around, he did a survey, believe it or not, of members of Congress to ask how many of them had a child in the military. What he discovered was that there was only one senator whose child was enlisted in the military. And he said something at the time he wrote this that this will be the first war the US has fought in almost a century and a half with a tax cut and without a military draft. And he said the American establishment, political, economic and journalistic, has no personal stake in the armed forces. This war. And this really reads like almost clairvoyant in retrospect. He said this war will mean the complete separation of people in power in Washington from the people at peril in the Persian Gulf.
- [22:32]
Jane Mayer
Evan, you did some fantastic reporting in your book Wildland, about the effects of this war in West Virginia, sort of where many of the people fought it. I just wonder, how do you see the fallout from the war in a place like that?
- [22:47]
Evan Osnos
You know, if you go to a place like this city of Clarksburg, West Virginia, where I spent a lot of time, you see this concentrated impact in a couple of ways. One, it's a place that disproportionately contributes to the military. And you see that in Alaska, Montana, across the South. There are specific places in this country that just give more than they receive, in effect. And then at the same time, those are places that have fallen further and further away from the American economic story. And these two things have become intertwined because in effect, and this is sort of a generalization, but as the mines and the factories closed, people came back from these wars and had nothing to do and had no way to latch back in to the mythology of being an American. You know, that sort of one of the bequests of World War II was this idea that you could be a vet who goes off and fights for the country and comes back and then there's something for you. And over and over again, I would run into people who were embittered by the experience of coming back. And in fact, when you look at January 6th and the number of people, there was a fascinating analysis done by NPR shortly after the insurrection on January 6 that showed that one in five of the people arrested at the Capitol in that violence had been military veterans in the post 9, 11 wars. So there was a real impact in that sense of betrayal and a falling away from their connection to American society and state.
- [24:13]
Susan Glasser
Yeah. And I think that is part of and is a driving factor in the dysfunction of our politics and that it is the failure of our politics. At just that moment. Congress is breaking down over this exact period when these veterans are returning and needing American help. Congress is less and less able to legislate. It's less and less able to come together. And also it's purposefully manipulated. I mean, it's not just that there was some sort of organic breakdown in trust in society or an organic waning of trust and confidence in experts. But Trump and all that he represents have purposefully, consciously sought to annihilate Americans trust in institutions, in expertise, in authority. It was a betrayal from the top. And arguably that has continued in a way that has fueled the discontent and the concerns. And I think the other factor that is also a hangover from the George W. Bush era that we didn't talk about is that it was twin shocks. So you have this war that turns out to be launched on essentially false pretenses. Right. And that is a shock to the system. And it also reveals a certain hollowness at the core of the American superpower. Right. It shows that our military, for all of its extraordinary capabilities, is not really able to provide an all purpose solution to a geopolitical problem. And then, boom, what happens just a few years later? The 2008 economic crisis. And it's these twin drivers, I think, of this kind of inward looking populism that remains the political moment we're living in. And that's why I think it's right to say that there is an Iraq syndrome hanging over this country in the same way that there was a Vietnam syndrome hanging over the United States for.
- [26:13]
Evan Osnos
A previous generation and hanging over the image of the United States abroad. I mean, if you look at the impact of, of the invasion of Iraq, and then of course, as Susan says, the 2008 financial crisis that fundamentally changed how the United States was perceived in places like Beijing, where they began to say, hold on a second, we sort of imagine that the United States knew what it was doing. And now we have to reexamine those assumptions. And that contributed to this inward turn and ultimately a more aggressive. The political scene will be back in just a moment.
- [26:54]
Susan Glasser
I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's Global Editorial Director.
- [26:57]
Evan Osnos
I'm Michael Kollory, Wired's Director of Consumer, Tech and Culture.
- [27:01]
Susan Glasser
And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show, Uncanny Valley is about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley. And right now, Silicon Valley and Washington have never been more intertwined. So each week we get together to talk about a big story, often at the intersection of tech and politics.
- [27:20]
Evan Osnos
Right. So whether we're talking about Trump, Coin, Doge, or Elon Musk, we will always explain how these Silicon Valley forces are.
- [27:28]
Susan Glasser
Affecting Washington and how they affect you. Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
- [27:42]
Evan Osnos
Jane, Today you have this emerging split within the Republican Party of a sort of more hawkish element, or one that is more traditionally aligned with the willingness and the belief in going to war to exert American power. And then this isolationist wing of the Republican Party, which is now gathering strength. It is certainly not yet a majority of the party at the leadership level, but you hear a growing chorus. How do you see these two pieces of it?
- [28:13]
Jane Mayer
I mean, I think it depends when you say it's not at the leadership level who you think the leadership of the party is at this point. I mean, if you're looking at the Senate, you've got Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, who has really taken a lead role in sustaining this tremendous US Military support for Ukraine. And he makes a very strong argument, for the moral reasons and the political reasons, that this is a fight that. That America needs to support. But on the other side, when you take a look at the man who's considered to be, in many ways, the leader of the party running for in 2024, Donald Trump, he is saying, this isn't a fight. That's our fight. It's a waste of money. And most amazing during this last week is we've now seen the main rival to him, at least ostensibly, the governor of Florida, DeSantis, taking the same position. He doesn't support the US involvement in this fight. And so we're beginning to see the isolationist wing, the America first wing, really rearing its head in a big way and sort of saying, we shouldn't be involved in this in a way. I mean, I think if you go back and you want to see where the key turning point in this was, it begins in some ways with Trump, who was the first to really voice this view, this skepticism about the war in Iraq in a way that people thought at the time was going to kill his campaign prospects.
- [29:52]
Evan Osnos
It was sort of an outside the bounds thing to say, but it turned out to actually be reflecting an underlying sense.
- [29:58]
Jane Mayer
There's a great scene, and there's a piece in the Washington Post that was looking back at how the party of Reagan has abandoned sort of taking a muscular foreign policy around the world. And it suggests that in February 2016, there was a presidential debate. And at that point, Trump spoke up and he called the US Involvement in the war in Iraq a big fat mistake. And Jeb Bush was in the same debate, and he defended it. And everybody thought this would be the end of Trump's campaign. It was in South Carolina, and instead, it was the end of Jeb Bush.
- [30:34]
Susan Glasser
Yeah, the truth is, is that there would be no Donald Trump had there not been an Iraq war and a George W. Bush. I think that Trump was possibly for the war before he was against it, but he actually was speaking out for years. If you go back even before that debate, to the very beginning, listen to Trump's very first campaign announcement appearance, it's an attack on Bush as much as his attack on Barack Obama, by the way, another president who would not have been president if not for the Iraq war. So in many ways, the reaction, the American political backlash to Iraq created all of the successive precedents. Barack Obama came to fame as an anti war state legislator in Illinois. It defined his candidacy in particular served as a sharp contrast to Hillary Clinton, enabling him to win the 2008 presidential primary. Donald Trump, I think, used the failures of George W. Bush and his own party's establishment as the creation and the origin myth of his own political Persona. And he continues to bash away at the Bushes even though they're mostly absent from American political discourse, except for Donald Trump, who keeps wanting to bring them back. I was speaking with another former official of the Bush administration the other day and he said, I'm gonna call it the reductio ad Arakim. That basically that's the new rule in Republican Party politics, it appears, which is that you have to reference back to the failure of Iraq and George W. Bush in order to give your credentials to serve as a Republican leader today. And that may explain Ron DeSantis remarkable statement. And by the way, I think it's important to note because we're just quickly making this leap from Iraq to the war in Ukraine, you can be against the war in Iraq if you're a Republican politician today. And in fact, by and large, most Republicans, Republican voters as well as politicians are not exactly out there defending Bush's decision. But to go from that to the idea that you are going to call Russia's invasion of its neighbor a war of annihilation and imperial aggression, and to say that that, as Ron DeSantis said this week, he didn't just say he didn't want to support military assistance. Ron DeSantis called it a territorial dispute. And it's a really long road that the Republicans have traveled from going to war. Preemptive war is what the Bush administration doctrine was. Preemptive war against a potential threat that turned out not to exist. And going from there to saying we shouldn't go to the defense of a struggling democracy whose neighbor is literally attacking them in an unprovoked way. That's a shocking leap, and it's not a straight line.
- [33:43]
Evan Osnos
You're absolutely right. And it's a great way, I think, to sort of capture and sum up the trajectory and the distance that the party has traveled in that time. Jane, I want to give you the last word here. As you think about the legacy of this war and the capacity for Washington to either learn lessons or escape lessons, how much do you think the war in Iraq really has changed some of the dangerous processes, the thought processes, the mistakes of thinking that led us into that?
- [34:17]
Jane Mayer
I think we're still living with the effects of it in so many ways. It's been the source of sort of alienation of the country from the government, a distrust of that. We did talk a little bit about its distrust of the intelligence community, but also distrust of the press. And one of the ways that I hope that it maybe is something we can learn from is for the press, which is to maintain skepticism, particularly when it comes to seeing a sort of a war fever which is sweeping Washington at any particular point. I think it's so important that we really think hard, examine the facts, and go the extra mile.
- [35:01]
Susan Glasser
Hear, hear.
- [35:02]
Evan Osnos
Susan, Jane, you know, sometimes on our show, we talk about things that are fleeting and ephemeral. You know, the issue of the day, this is not one of those. This is an issue that we will all be contending with to years to come. And I'm grateful to both of you for the way you've helped us understand it. Thanks for this conversation. This has been the political scene. I'm Evan Osnos. We had production assistance today from Alex d' Elia and Dan Richards. Stephen Valentino is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Alison Leighton Brown. Thank you so much for listening and we'll see you next week.
- [35:51]
Susan Glasser
I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global editorial director.
- [35:54]
Evan Osnos
I'm Michael Colori, Wired's Director of Consumer Tech and Culture.
- [35:57]
Susan Glasser
And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show, Uncanny Valley is all about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley. At Wired, we're constantly reporting on how technology is changing every aspect of our our lives. So each week on the show, we get together to talk about one of the biggest stories in tech.
- [36:16]
Evan Osnos
Right? So whether we're talking about privacy, AI, social media, or a major tech figure, we will always explain the Silicon Valley forces behind these stories and how they affect you.
- [36:27]
Susan Glasser
Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
- [36:38]
Jane Mayer
From PRX.