Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley.

I'm Wired's director of business and industry, Zoe Schiffer.

Today on the show, we talk about this week's market madness and the impact of Trump's tariffs.

I'm joined today by Wired's senior business editor, Louise Matsakis, the person I talked to you 100,000 times the day about everything going on in our newsroom.

Welcome to Uncanny Valley, Louise.

Hey, Zoe, I'm glad to be here.

So let's jump right in with Monday morning because yesterday we both logged on to thewire.com Slack account and saw this

tweet from Walter Bloomberg, an aggregator account on X, saying that President Trump was considering

a 90-day pause on the tariffs he had announced just last week. The markets reacted pretty wildly.

So Louise, take us through that. Yeah, basically there was this

enormous swing. So, you know, the markets plunged and then they turned around and then they

plunged again. And I think that this is just a sign of how volatile things are right now in the

global economy. Walter Bloomberg is kind of like one of these accounts on Elon Musk's ex that is sort of like

a scourge, I would say. I think his avatar was like stolen from some Russian guy and it's like

totally unrelated. I think that this just shows how muddled the messaging is from the White House about

this. I think that the reason that the markets

responded so immediately and so intensely is that it sounded like something that Trump might do, right?

Like some people in the administration have framed this as a negotiating tactic and that the

tariffs are going to be reversed and that it was just sort of this provocative measure.

Whereas other people are saying, no, like this is our strategy, we're not going to back down.

Like, you know, these tariffs are here to stay.

And this account usually just kind of like steals headlines from mainstream news organizations

...