This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Evan Osnos, sitting in today for David Remnick.

I'm based in Washington for The New Yorker, and I can tell you that some of the best political reporting on Trump's second term has actually come from a tech magazine, Wired.

First, Wired published a series of scoops about Elon Musk's reign in the White House.

And even though Musk has moved on, Doge is still having a massive and disruptive influence

in our government and in many people's lives and jobs.

It could be startling to realize how much the tech industry is setting the agenda for American

politics right now.

Donald Trump, who after all used social media to triumph in politics, has also become a major promoter and beneficiary of

cryptocurrency. And meanwhile, AI is at the top of every serious conversation about the world and how

it's changing. Wired has been covering all of this really well. So I recently sat down with its

global editorial director, Katie Drummond.

Drummond is also the co-host of Wired's podcast called Uncanny Valley.

Katie, we are talking about six months into this administration, and we'll get to what Wired has

explained recently as Doge 2.0 in just a second.

But I want to start by going back for a moment to when this effort began because Doge has been a hard

target for journalists to pin down. It's operating very much in the shadows by design. It's not subject to a lot of

the usual disclosure rules at other agencies. But Wired has really dug into this over the course

of the administration very successfully. I mean, you've found patterns, you've found individuals.

It seems like the experience of covering tech turned out to be

unusually helpful to covering politics right now. And I want to know how that became clear to you.

How did you and your colleagues confront this puzzle of covering Doge? I would say,

...