How China Is Hoping to Attract Tech Talent

When news broke last month that H1-B visa holders in the US would be subjected to a new hefty fee of $100,000, chaos and confusion ensued for a lot of tech workers and their employers. It’s the latest in a string of restrictive visa measures imposed by the Trump administration that has been making tech talent wonder if they should look elsewhere.

Lauren Goode sits down with senior writer Zeyi Yang and senior editor Louise Matsakis to discuss the short-term and long-term effects of these measures, and how China is seizing the moment and offering a new visa program to bring tech talent into the country.

You can follow Lauren Goode on Bluesky at @laurengoode, Zeyi Yang on Bluesky at @zeyiyang, and Louise Matsakis on Bluesky at @lmatsakis. Write to us at [email protected].

Mentioned in this episode:
$3,800 Flights and Aborted Takeoffs: How Trump’s H-1B Announcement Panicked Tech Workers by Zeyi Yang
China Rolls Out Its First Talent Visa as the US Retreats on H-1Bs by Louise Matsakis
A Journey Into the Heart of Labubu by Zeyi Yang

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Transcript

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

Lauren Goode: Hey, Louise. How are you doing this week?

Louise Matsakis: I'm good. I'm excited to be here covering for Mike this week,

Lauren Goode: Especially considering that it sounds like there's a lot going on outside of your apartment.

Louise Matsakis: Yes, there is a giant sinkhole on my block, so I currently have no running water. Very exciting.

Lauren Goode: And yet you're podcasting through it? Incredibly grateful.

Louise Matsakis: Of course, Lauren. Nothing would get in the way between me and podcasting.

Lauren Goode: Well, thank you for being our guest co-host two weeks in a row. It's a really busy time for everyone. And I'm particularly excited to have you on the pod today because of the topic we're going to be discussing. Before we dive into it, we have another colleague joining us today too, Zeyi Yang. Hey, Zeyi. How's it going?

Zeyi Yang: I'm good. I'm joining the last warm day of New York. I think the highest is 80 degrees today, but it's all downhill from now.

Lauren Goode: So, Zeyi, you recently reported on something that went down right after the Trump administration announced last month that H-1B visa holders, which is one of the most popular work visa programs in the country, would need to pay a hefty new $100,000 fee. You spoke with a source at the time, who you identify as Xie Yun, about her direct experience. Tell us briefly what happened to her.

Zeyi Yang: So, Xie Yun, she works for semiconductor companies in Silicon Valley, and she has just been on a six-week business trip that ended in Bangkok. So, after that, she was planning on, I think, spending two or three weeks time at home in China. So, she was just on this flight from Bangkok to Hong Kong to her home city in Wuqi. And then, right as the plane was touching down, she connected to the internet and saw that Trump announced this new $100,000 H-1B visa fee that could apply to her. Within the next three hours, she was panicking, and she was talking with her friends about what she could do. And then, she immediately got on the plane back to the United States through Shanghai and then to Los Angeles. So, really, it's one of the examples of a lot of people like her who are on H-1B Visas, but outside of the United States, who are really struggling to figure out whether they will have to pay $100,000 if they just didn't return to the United States in 24 hours. And that was really the latest of a series of immigration changes under the current Trump administration that's making a lot of people unsure what their official life will be as an immigrant worker in Silicon Valley and the broader US.

Lauren Goode: This is WIRED's Uncanny Valley, a show about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley. Today, we're talking about the state of work visas for tech talent. The Trump administration's recent announcement that the new H-1B visa holders would need to pay a fee of $100,000 created a wave of confusion for a lot of tech workers and their employers. The move cemented the administration's ongoing crackdown on visas, and it stands in stark contrast to China's approach. China announced a new visa program designed to attract young professionals and people with degrees in science and tech to study and do business there. We're going to dive into the impacts these different approaches could have on the tech industry from the talent pipeline to the future of innovation. I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at WIRED.

Louise Matsakis: I'm Louise Matsakis, senior business editor.

Zeyi Yang: And I'm Zeyi Yang, senior writer covering tech and business in China.

Lauren Goode: So, Zeyi, you were telling us about Xie Yun's experience and how she had to turn all of her plans around and found herself in this migratory limbo when news broke of the new fee for H-1B visas. There's been some additional reporting since then around what the rules and fees actually are for H-1B visas now. But let's take a step back to how these visas actually work for listeners who are not familiar, and then we can talk about why the new directive caused so much chaos. How do they typically work?

Louise Matsakis: So, the H-1B visas were first introduced in 1990, so they have been around for over 30 years. And the best way to understand it is it's really the easiest visa for people with a bachelor or advanced degree to get to be able to work United States legally. And so you're talking about a lot of people who either received their higher education back home or inside the United States, who are relying on this pretty stable visa program to get an office job, a teaching job, a hospital job in the United States. And in the past decade, what we have seen is that the Silicon Valley, the tech companies, have really been taking advantage of this program because this is a way for them to bring thousands of skilled workers who have advanced degrees to work for them. And that's why we're seeing that some of the big tech companies are, every single year, the largest sponsors of H-1B Visas.

Lauren Goode: There is a cap on the number of visas that are allowed, right? And then the employers actually have to submit the workers that they want to sponsor, so talk a little bit about that process.

Louise Matsakis: Yeah, exactly. I think the first requirement for H-1B Visa is that you have to have a full-time job, and your employer has to be the one who's willing to pay the lawyer's fee, pay the application fee to sponsor this visa application for you. And then we get to the second part, which is that there's only a certain number of H-1B visas that will be given out every year, and the number of applications are usually above that. So then you go into a lottery system where basically every single person has the equal chance, unless you have a master's degree, which you get a second chance to be drawn as the lottery winner of the H-1B visa this year. And if you don't, you have to wait a full year before you can enter the pool again.

Lauren Goode: Got it. So, in recent years, as you've mentioned, we've seen that companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Google, along with some really big IT consulting firms, tend to be the entities that hoover up the most H-1Bs for their employees. It's pretty critical to the tech industry; therefore, this directive, this new directive that came out a few weeks ago, really threw the industry into chaos. Why was it so confusing?

Louise Matsakis: Well, first of all, that weekend ... so the policy was first announced on Friday, and then it was updated on Saturday and Sunday. All of the language from different White House officials and documents are different. One of the examples was that when the Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, was announcing this in the White House in front of reporters, he was saying that, "Oh, people have to pay this H-1B fee every single year." And then the second day, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt came out and said, "Actually, no, it's only a one-time fee." It's completely different from what they said just a day ago. So, back then, there was a lot of confusion about how much you have to pay for it. And also, one of the biggest confusions when it was first announced is that if you have already acquired H-1B, going through the sponsorship and a lot of the system that we have just talked about, are you still going to have to pay for it? And then that was again explained the second day that, "Oh, actually, if you already have a valid visa now, you will be exempted from this new policy." But a lot of people were already panicking between those two days.

Lauren Goode: Wait, why is the US Commerce Secretary involved in visa decisions? Louise, do you have any insight into that?

Louise Matsakis: Well, Lauren, the main reason is that Congress is not involved. Right? It's pretty clear that it would take an act of Congress to actually change all of these immigration policies in a sound legal way. But instead, what we're seeing is the Trump administration is acting unilaterally to introduce these changes. And one of the main projects that Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, has taken up is raising money for the US government, so this $100,000 fee is one example of that. And another is something called the Gold Visa, which I reported on with our colleague Zoë Schiffer earlier this year, and it's this $1 million visa that seemingly any rich person anywhere in the world would be able to buy in order to immigrate to the US.

Lauren Goode: That sounds incredibly unorthodox.

Louise Matsakis: I think that's very fair. This is not the way that immigration policy usually plays out, and it's not clear at this point if anyone has actually paid for a Gold Visa, or if anyone has paid that $100,000 fee, and if they did, whether they could then take the administration to court.

Lauren Goode: Interesting. Okay. Well, if anyone has paid for that visa, we want to hear from you, so please contact us on our signals. I want us to talk more about what this means for the future pipeline of talent and immigration to the US. But can one of you tell us quickly what are the critiques of the current H-1B program?

Louise Matsakis: I think I can answer that question, Lauren. So, in a lot of ways, the H-1B Visa program has basically become two different programs under the same umbrella. So, on one hand, a lot of these visas are going to some of the best engineers in the world. They're going to AI researchers. They're going to doctors who work at companies all across the country, and hospitals and in clinics at universities. But on the other hand, a lot of these visas are going to these IT firms, which basically are providing IT support for companies, and a lot of these jobs are fairly low-paying. They are technically tech jobs, but it's not necessarily this highly skilled worker that you might have in mind who maybe works somewhere like Google or OpenAI. It's more of a everyday IT job where you're fixing people's computers, maybe troubleshooting a software problem. And so the critique of the H-1B visa is that those are jobs that a lot of Americans could do. Right? Those are not specialized skills necessarily, and there's been a lot of criticism in recent years that those IT firms are essentially abusing the H-1B visa to bring in workers who often are being exploited or who are not really working these super important jobs to our economy, and that those roles could actually be taken by Americans.

Lauren Goode: And is there any sense of whether or not changing the economic structure of the H-1B would actually change that?

Louise Matsakis: There have been a number of proposals that the Trump administration has floated. One of them is not making it a lottery anymore. So instead, they wanted to prioritize people who are making the highest salaries. But a critique of that approach is that you don't necessarily know when, say, someone like Elon Musk comes to the US, whether they're going to be a once-in-a-generation entrepreneur or whether they're going to play a hand in developing something like ChatGPT. And so, having this lottery system essentially allows us to bring in a wide swath of people who are at different points in their career as opposed to only giving these visas to established experts who are at the top of the income ladder already.

Lauren Goode: Right. Yeah, and certainly in academia, the best talent aren't necessarily people who are paid the most.

Zeyi Yang: Lauren and Louise, I don't think you guys have heard this from me yet, but I have been through that process too. After I graduated from grad school here, my first visa that I applied for was an H-1B visa, and I didn't get a lottery. Well, at that point, obviously, I am angry. I was like, "Why is this a random lottery process? It doesn't really consider into anything." But if the way to amend that is to only give it to the highest learners, well, I still wouldn't have gotten that visa too. So, I do feel like there are a lot of people who are not sure if a lottery system is the best system for H-1B, but again, I think they would be equally upset if you're just ranking people's salary and giving out visas on that basis only.

Lauren Goode: Great point, and we're glad you made it here to WIRED, Zeyi. Zeyi, what are some of the other stories that you're hearing from your sources in how this is going to affect them?

Zeyi Yang: I think we can separate into the short-term and the long-term impacts. The short-term is that during that weekend, the policy was announced on September 19th. A lot of people were making last-minute travel plan changes because they were not sure if they don't come back to the US soon enough, they will have to pay the fee. So, I'm hearing from people who just landed in China, who was planning on taking a whole month off in China, that just rushed back to the United States as soon as possible. I also heard from Emily, who works in finance in New York City, who was literally on the plane to Paris for a vacation. And then, when the plan was about to take off, she actually heard back from an immigration attorney that she was consulting, who she said, "I think you should not leave the country at this point." So she talked to the flight attendant to tell the pilot that she needs to get off the plane, and the pilot actually allowed her, so that was one of the most dramatic experiences I have heard. But what I'm hearing, generally speaking, is that people are losing money. People are missing out on weddings and family holidays just to make sure they don't fall victim to the new policy. And then, on the long term, there are still a lot of things unclear about this H-1B visa policy. For example, people who are changing jobs, people who already got a lottery but have to transfer that to a new employer, would they have to pay this? I think there are a lot of questions unanswered at this point. They still might be impacted even though they have already gone through the H-1B process before.

Lauren Goode: We should also note that there's this interesting caveat to the new fee rule. The administration is going to allow certain industries or employers to secure exemptions from the administration, and this is all per the discretion of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. And critics of this are obviously worried that this could maybe create a mechanism for companies to flatter the administration for special favors, which, in some ways, seems to be the M.O. Any last words from you guys on what you think the short-term and long-term effects of this ongoing hostility towards visa holders could mean for the tech industry?

Louise Matsakis: I think it's worth noting that this new $100,000 fee still does not have a sound legal basis. The H-1B visa program was created through an act of Congress. It is a law, whereas this new fee was basically something that was slapped on top of that via an executive order. I think we could still see potential litigation here. This could be an issue that goes all the way to the Supreme Court. But in the meantime, it's creating a lot of uncertainty for companies. It's going to make hiring harder. And I think, like so many of the economic policies that the Trump administration is introducing, it's just creating chaos, and it's making it more difficult for anyone to predict what's going to happen next or to make decisions.

Zeyi Yang: Going back to the potential exemptions that might be given to certain industries or companies, one interesting thing I observed after the announcement of the policy is that some Silicon Valley figures have been trying to see the brighter side of this, namely Sam Altman and Jensen Huang, because when they were publicly being asked about what they think of the new H-1B fees, they were saying, "Oh, maybe this will help us choose which direction we want to go with legal immigration." And I think my interpretation of that is that if certain industries like AI or semiconductors can get exemptions while other industries don't, it will create a clear policy advantage for those industries. So, I think some certain companies are also trying to see if maybe this will become a good thing for them. They'll create some advantage for them, but not for the others in the future.

Lauren Goode: So you're saying there's a world in which the most powerful men get to shape the policy.

Zeyi Yang: How surprising is that?

Lauren Goode: Exactly. All right, let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about China's counter approach to all of this. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. Today, we're talking about how new rules around visas like the H-1B are shaking up Silicon Valley. Now we're going to turn our attention to China, which, unlike the US, is actively trying to make it easier for tech talent to join its workforce. But the story is a little bit more complicated than it seems. Louise, you recently reported on this new visa, the K visa, that is designed to attract more STEM graduates and workers to go to China. Tell us about this.

Louise Matsakis: So, we don't have all the details of this visa yet, but Chinese authorities have said that applicants won't be required to obtain an invitation letter from a specific company. That means that the visa is not tied to individual employers the way that the H-1B visa in the US is. So that means a foreigner could come and have the flexibility to explore different startups in Shanghai or maybe see if they want to join a hacker house or something in a tech hub like Hangzhou. So, in a way, China is definitely seizing the moment. It's positioning itself to attract leading scientists and researchers who might be shut out of the United States. But Chinese social media has been flooded over the past couple of weeks with angry comments about the K visa. Many people have expressed concerns that it will give foreign workers an edge over domestic STEM graduates. I think in some sense these anxieties are pretty understandable because youth unemployment is already really high in China, and there are a ton of super qualified STEM graduates and just college graduates, in general, who are struggling to find work. But on the other hand, when Zeyi and I started looking through some of the commentary about this visa program, there was definitely a lot of nationalism and xenophobic rhetoric, if not just outright racism.

Lauren Goode: What's an example of that?

Louise Matsakis: So, for example, there were some Chinese influencers who were spreading these conspiracy theories that Indians were plotting to use the visa to immigrate to China en masse.

Lauren Goode: Interesting. You've both covered China's businesses and workforce for years. Was this backlash surprising to you?

Zeyi Yang: I would say yes, but also no. The no is because I know China has never been an immigrant country, so the idea to introduce a lot of foreign talents to the country, giving them some kind of preferential treatment over others, it's definitely going to cause some kind of outrage from the population. That part I am sure. The thing is that I feel that after China has been trying to open up to the world for quite a few decades at this point, I was expecting there to be a little bit more patience from the Chinese people because China also wants to be an AI leader at this age. And right now, the only model they can look after is the United States, which has been building on a ton of immigrant talent to build the AI industry. So, I was thinking maybe that kind of policy orientation will push them over the xenophobic obstacles that we are seeing, but unfortunately, the situation that seems to have happened is that it cannot.

Lauren Goode: So there are some cultural challenges to this. I mean, what do you think are some of the other challenges that China will face as it tries to roll out this K visa and attract foreign talent?

Louise Matsakis: I mean, I think the main thing is just that China, like Zeyi said, is absolutely not a country of immigrants. In 2020, only about 0.1% of the mainland population was made up of foreigners, according to one estimate. And it's also worth noting that that estimate includes people from Taiwan, Macau, and Hong Kong. These are places that are very culturally similar to China. So, the number of people who come from Africa, or North America, or Europe is just astonishingly small compared to the population size of China. In the US, about 15% of the people who live in this country are immigrants. That's a huge difference. So, I think that it can be hard for new arrivals to adjust. It's a difficult language. There's an entirely different ecosystem of apps and programs that you have to use. I remember the first time I went on a business trip to China, I needed to get the receipt for my expenses, and I was like, "Can you email me a PDF of my receipt?" And the people at the hotel looked at me like I was crazy. And they were like, "We're just going to send it over WeChat." And I was like, "Oh." There are a lot of small things like that that are really different, whereas, because for the last few decades, American culture and American tech companies have been so ubiquitous in the rest of the world, someone who comes to the US from India or from Europe, they're probably going to be using the same email platforms, the same social media networks. And a lot of the business norms are similar, right? Of course, there's still cultural differences. And if those people get homesick, they can find an immigrant community wherever they are. They can find food that reminds them of home. That's not necessarily the case in China. And so, I think the idea of a city like Shanghai or Beijing becoming a truly cosmopolitan hub that is a mix of different cultures is something that I think is really far off from now. I think it could happen, and I think it's likely that it will happen as the shifts of global power tilt away from the US. I think in this era where we're not making a lot of good choices, and we're not really making a lot of friends around the world, it's certainly possible, but China is just starting from a really different place than a city like San Francisco.

Lauren Goode: And also, Zeyi, you're a native Mandarin speaker. Louise, you've been trying to learn Mandarin. You spent three months last year doing an intensive, and you were telling me just how hard it is. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Louise Matsakis: Yeah, I mean, I think I'm at a disadvantage because I started learning Chinese when I was 25. And as I can attest, in China, English is part of the high school exam that you use to go to college, which is a very famous and really hard test called the Gaokao. So, throughout elementary school and high school, students in China learn English, so that's also a reason that it can be harder to adjust because English is, for better or worse, the language of global business. So, a lot of immigrants who come to a place like the United States already have a lot of familiarity with the language. And yes, I can attest personally that if you wish to learn Chinese, it is incredibly rewarding, but I would see it as a journey for the rest of your life. It's not something you're going to master. It is something you're going to be doing forever. And I think it's great, and I encourage other people to do it, but it's not a stepping stone to a career in China. It's something you're going to have to really dedicate yourself to, and I think that that's another important barrier.

Lauren Goode: There's also, though, this growing curiosity in the US right now around specialty Chinese exports. And Zeyi, you just did this incredible feature for WIRED about the Labubu phenomenon. Can you talk a little bit about that too, and whether or not this growing curiosity, or you might even call it an acceptance of elements of Chinese culture, translates into people actually maybe considering moving to China?

Lauren Goode: All of this is happening, of course, as we have been covering this, I think, completely unprecedented AI race. There is a massive AI race happening right now between the US and China. We have these regulations in the US right now in the form of export controls that are really meant to stifle China's competitiveness. It's pretty specific to hardware chips, in particular. How is this competition playing out in the talent front? Could these new immigration policies play a really significant role in the AI race?

Louise Matsakis: I definitely think that we could see a lot of top talent either go to China from other parts of the world, or stay in China, or return to China. Even before Trump returned to the White House, over the last, I would say, decade or two, there's been sort of periodic crackdowns on Chinese researchers in the US. There was this witch hunt under the first Trump administration that was called the China Initiative, and it was basically a program that was supposed to catch Chinese researchers that were allegedly involved in improper research collaborations with their colleagues in China who were taking funding. That was problematic in some way, but I think it sent a chill through universities across the US, and I think it made a lot of some of the top Chinese researchers reconsider whether they wanted to stay in the US or whether they felt comfortable here. So I think the first thing I'm looking out for is a drop in the number of Chinese PhD STEM students in the US, big names that might be going back to China, professors who were giving up their tenureship here and taking positions at prestigious Chinese universities. I definitely think that we're going to see that, and I think we're already seeing that, but I think the other big shoe to drop would be whether we see Chinese startups and Chinese tech companies that are able to recruit high-profile international talent. I think that would definitely be a major shift in the landscape. If you see someone who's like, "You know what? I don't want to put up with living in San Francisco. I'm going to go to Shanghai, and I'm going to take on the adventure even though the language is hard, even though there are all these other barriers." That to me would really say, "Okay, things have shifted."

Lauren Goode: Zeyi, any last thoughts on that?

Zeyi Yang: Yeah. I really want to emphasize the point that H-1B visa is one part of the broader immigration policy or process, right? It is a very essential part connecting higher education and a stable employment in the United States. And as we have seen in the past, this is a pathway that will create people like Elon Musk and Microsoft's Satya Nadella. And when we are looking at H-1B being impacted right now, the effect will also extend to all the upstream, downstream immigration pathways and the reasons why people come to the United States. Like Louise mentioned, I think one thing we're going to see is that a lot of international students, when they're considering where they want to pursue higher education, they might think more about countries other than the United States because they see the H-1B visa is being hit with this new fee. Maybe the other immigration visa, maybe the student visas will be restricted in the future too, and all of those forces will come to this result that the US is just harder and harder to attract talents from student level to entry-career, mid-career level to work here, to start companies here, and to innovate here.

Lauren Goode: Thanks to you both for your insights on this. And I should mention to our listeners too that Zeyi and Louise have a fantastic newsletter for WIRED called Made in China, where they've been covering this and a lot of other topics, so please subscribe to that. We're going to take another quick break, and we're going to come back with recommendations. All right, Zeyi Louise, before we go, we always like to share our personal recommendations with our listeners. Zeyi, I'll start with you. What's your recommendation this week?

Zeyi Yang: Sure. Just last night, I went to the screening of a documentary called Made in Ethiopia. It's a very interesting story. It's this Chinese entrepreneur who built a gigantic industry zone for manufacturing companies in Ethiopia by attracting Chinese investment, trying to replicate the Chinese way of development in Ethiopia. And the filming crew really spent five years there documenting the whole process of how this industry zone was first celebrated, was adored by local people, and then became a point of contention in the end. So, really, really good, insightful, and a very complicated topic to discuss in that documentary, so I would recommend everyone to watch it. I believe it's available on demand on PBS right now.

Lauren Goode: Amazing. I'm definitely going to check that out. Louise, what's your recommendation?

Louise Matsakis: First of all, I really want to see that movie, and I was just looking at the screening, Zeyi, and I'm jealous that you got to see what looks like the last one in the US for a while, but I am relieved to hear that it's streaming on PBS. I'm going to recommend another publication, which is called The New York Review of Architecture. This is an incredibly grassroots, funny, self-referential, whimsical publication that covers our environment and why the buildings around us are the way that they are. I went to a launch party on Saturday for a special edition, which was the Los Angeles Review of Architecture, and I just found the vibes of the people who wrote for this publication, the people who were editing it, to be such a breath of fresh air, and I recommend everybody subscribe.

Lauren Goode: That's great. Did you say that it's a monthly magazine?

Louise Matsakis: I think it comes out every other month, and it's a print publication. It looks like a newspaper, which is a fun format.

Lauren Goode: We love print.

Louise Matsakis: Yes, we do. Lauren, what's your recommendation this week?

Lauren Goode: I was actually going to recommend your Made in China newsletter, which I already gave a plug to earlier in the podcast, because it really is so good. I learn so much from reading you guys every week, but now I have to come up with something else, and so on the fly, I'm going to recommend ... this is a very geographically specific recommendation, the Greek yogurt from Souvla. Do you guys know what I'm talking about?

Louise Matsakis: No.

Zeyi Yang: I think I do, actually.

Lauren Goode: Souvla is this contemporary Greek restaurant. It's like a chain. It is a chain restaurant here in San Francisco that makes this really, really good frozen Greek yogurt with all kinds of toppings, and lately, I've been pretty obsessed with the one that has olive oil and sea salt on top. It's sweet because it's yogurt, but then it has the savory kick to it, and I've been trying to replicate it at home too, so that I'm not spending all of this money on Souvla Greek yogurt. I have not yet found the perfect combination, but I would recommend that if you're in the area and you have the opportunity to try it, try it. Or if you are a frozen yogurt aficionado, try putting a little bit of olive oil and sea salt on it because it is so good.

Zeyi Yang: You know what, Lauren? I'd also try swapping a little bit of that olive oil with chili crisps.

Lauren Goode: Ooh.

Zeyi Yang: Let's see how that works.

Lauren Goode: Ooh, that's a good one. Just the chili crisps? No salt?

Zeyi Yang: Well, you can pair it with something else too, some other condiments. Don't do it too much because you don't want your frozen yogurt to be completely spicy, but just a little bit of that will make it interesting.

Lauren Goode: I love that. All right, I'm going to do that next time. Thank you, Zeyi. Thanks to all of you for listening to Uncanny Valley. If you like what you heard today, make sure to follow our show, rate it on your podcast app of choice. If you'd like to get in touch with us with any questions, or comments, or show suggestions, or your own recommendations, you can write to us at [email protected]. Today's show was produced by Adriana Tapia and Mark Lyda. Amar Lal at Macro Sound mixed this episode. Mark Lyda is our San Francisco studio engineer. Matt Giles fact-checked this episode. Kate Osborn is our executive producer. Katie Drummond is WIRED's Global Editorial Director, and Chris Bannon is Condé Nast's head of Global Audio.