Why Is Meta In Crisis?; Google Search Is Over; AI Gets Booed by Graduates
Uncanny Valley | WIRED
WIRED
4.1 • 570 Ratings
🗓️ 21 May 2026
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, the team discusses Meta’s recent layoffs and what they’ve been hearing from employees about the increasingly grim vibes at the company. They also talk about Musk losing his lawsuit against OpenAI, and Brian shares the key releases from Google’s annual conference — including an ambitious AI vision to browse the web as we know it. Finally, what do recent college graduates and women whose spouses work in AI have in common? They’re all sick of hearing about it.
Articles mentioned in this episode:
- Meta’s New Reality: Record High Profits. Record Low Morale | WIRED
- Everything Announced at Google I/O 2026: Gemini, Search, Smart Glasses | WIRED
- Google Search Goes Agentic—and Doesn’t Need You Anymore | WIRED
- Meet the Sad Wives of AI | WIRED
Join WIRED’s best and brightest on Uncanny Valley as they dissect the collision of tech, politics, finance, and business, from the newest ventures to the effects of inaccurate information from artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots on social protests.
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choicesTranscript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoe Schiffer, director of business and industry. |
| 0:06.8 | I'm Brian Barrett, executive editor. And I'm Leah Feiger, director of politics and science. |
| 0:11.1 | And we're all in the same room. Oh my gosh. For the first time on the podcast. |
| 0:15.2 | I got invited to the group chat. He did. Look at that. Today on the show, we're discussing the |
| 0:20.5 | complete meltdown over mass layoffs at Meta. |
| 0:24.1 | We spoke to more than a dozen employees, and it turns out the job cuts are far from the |
| 0:28.6 | only reason why meta employees are really going through it. |
| 0:31.6 | And of course, we wouldn't skip the Elon Musk verdict. |
| 0:34.6 | He lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and Open AI in really as full away as you can, as dramatically as possible. |
| 0:42.3 | I know Zoe, you're looking forward to talking about that. |
| 0:44.3 | And I'm looking forward to talking about Google's annual developer conference I.O. |
| 0:48.6 | where it debuted some dramatic changes to search. |
| 0:51.7 | And you might have seen that Google's former CEO, Eric Schmidt, recently got booed by graduating |
| 0:57.9 | students after he praised AI in a commencement speech. |
| 1:01.3 | We're going to get into why young adults might be using AI, but they have very complicated |
| 1:05.6 | feelings about it. |
| 1:07.0 | And later in the show, we're going to hear about why woman married to AI bros have had enough. |
| 1:15.4 | So first up, let's dive into what is happening at Meta. |
| 1:19.7 | This week, the company is letting go of roughly 10% of its workforce, which is about 8,000 employees total. It's the latest round of job cuts, |
| 1:30.2 | adding to the roughly 25,000 jobs that have been cut in the past few years as part of Mark Zuckerberg's |
| 1:36.2 | kind of year of efficiency that started in 2023 and now the latest AI forward workplace, which he |
| 1:43.3 | is trying to develop and impose. |
... |
Transcript will be available on the free plan in 13 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from WIRED, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of WIRED and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.