500th Episode Extravaganza
Uncanny Valley | WIRED
WIRED
4.1 • 570 Ratings
🗓️ 16 April 2021
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week marks the 500th episode of Gadget Lab. That is an astonishingly huge number; to pay proper tribute to it, we’ve invited some of Gadget Lab’s past co-hosts to come onto this week’s show and share their memories.
Our guests Mat Honan, David Pierce, and Arielle Pardes speak in their own words about what it was like to work at WIRED and make a weekly show about personal technology. It’s a fun stroll down memory lane, for sure. But this special episode also serves as a rare look behind the scenes of Gadget Lab, so you can get a sense of how this show is made, and how it has evolved over the years.
Show Notes:
Read Mat Honan’s fever dream of a guilt-ridden gadget reporter here. Read his story about Slack here. Read Arielle’s cover story about Chris Evans here. Find her story about breast pumps here and her story about tech workplaces in the pandemic here. Read Lauren’s cover story about Simone Giertz here. Subscribe to David Pierce’s Source Code newsletter here and listen to the Source Code podcast here. Read Mike’s coffee machine review here.
Mat Honan can be found on Twitter @mat. Arielle Pardes is @pardesoteric. David Pierce is @pierce. 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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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi everyone, welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Michael Colori, a senior editor here at Wired. |
| 0:11.8 | This week, we've got a special show for you. This is our 500th episode of Gadget Lab, and that is an astonishingly huge number. |
| 0:20.2 | It's hard even for me to believe, and I've been here for most of these. Now, since this is such a huge milestone, we want to pay proper tribute to it. So we're going to ditch the usual format this week and do something special instead. We're going to invite on some of the past co-hosts of this show. We'll check in with them and see how they're doing. We're going to ask them to |
| 0:37.9 | talk about their memories of being on Gadget Lab, their memories of working at Wired. It'll be a fun stroll down memory lane. It'll also be a rare look behind the scenes here, so you can get a sense of how the show is made and how it's evolved. So to set the scene a little bit, I want to take you all the way back to the beginning. |
| 0:54.8 | Most people don't know this, but Gadget Lab wasn't always a weekly audio podcast. |
| 0:59.0 | It actually started life as a video show sometime in the late 2000s. |
| 1:03.0 | There was a rotating cast of hosts, usually somebody from the Wired Gear team, |
| 1:07.0 | and we would sit in front of the camera and talk about whatever the new gadget was that week. After a couple of years, there was a change in management at Wired, and that video |
| 1:15.1 | series was canceled, along with a few other video series. It was all very sad, and for a while, |
| 1:21.6 | Wired didn't put out any videos or any podcasts for over a year. The feeds just went dark. |
| 1:27.4 | But we still had all of these subscribers, |
| 1:29.8 | people who were loyal to Wired and were expecting us to deliver something eventually. So in early |
| 1:35.0 | 2013, I started talking to my coworker Matt Honen about possibly doing an audio podcast, something |
| 1:41.1 | we could just start publishing, totally on the down low, completely under our boss's radar, just so we could give the loyal wired audio podcast. Something we could just start publishing, totally on the down low, completely under our |
| 1:45.2 | boss's radar, just so we could give the loyal Wired audience something to listen to. Also, |
| 1:50.7 | podcasts were exploding at the time in tech journalism, and we really felt like Wired needed |
| 1:56.6 | to have one. So let's pick it up there with my first co-host on GadgetLab and our first guest |
| 2:02.1 | on today's episode. Here's me and Lauren Good talking to Matt Honan. |
| 2:14.2 | Matt Honan, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me. It's been a while. |
| 2:18.2 | So you are an executive editor at BuzzFeed News. |
| 2:22.8 | And a long time ago, right before that job, you worked at Wired. |
| 2:26.1 | What were your years at Wired? Do you remember? |
... |
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