The Vibes-Based Pricing of ‘Pro’ AI Software

Chatbot premium subscriptions like ChatGPT Pro and Claude Max currently cost around $200, but it’s not clear why. Hosts Lauren Goode and and Michael Calore speak with staff writer Reece Rogers to find out what’s behind these models that AI companies bill as their most powerful, and whether they could become a staple in our future.

You can follow Michael Calore on Bluesky at @snackfight, Lauren Goode on Bluesky at @laurengoode, and Reece Rogers on Bluesky at @thiccreese. Write to us at [email protected].

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Michael Calore: Hey, this is Mike. Before we start, I'm going to share some exciting news with you. We're doing a live show in San Francisco on September 9th in partnership with the local station KQED. Lauren and I will sit down with our editor-in-chief, Katie Drummond, and we will have a special guest joining us for a conversation that you will not want to miss. You can use the link in the show notes to grab a ticket and invite a friend. We cannot wait to see you there. Hey, Lauren. How you doing?

Lauren Goode: Hi. I'm sorry. What's your name again? You've been gone for so long.

Michael Calore: I've been snorkeling on the moon. Yes.

Lauren Goode: I missed you a lot.

Michael Calore: I missed you, too.

Lauren Goode: Oh, thank you.

Michael Calore: How's the show?

Lauren Goode: The show has been not the same. Just not the same. We ran a rerun of our episode about Bryan Johnson paired with our wellness package on wired.com.

Michael Calore: Perfect.

Lauren Goode: So that was really fun. You know what? Things have been OK, but I missed you. I have to say that. How was your vacation?

Michael Calore: It was lovely. I couldn't wait to get back here in the chair and behind the microphone, though.

Lauren Goode: I don't believe that. Did you eat butter?

Michael Calore: No.

Lauren Goode: In honor of Katie.

Michael Calore: I did not.

Lauren Goode: Are you going to tell the folks what you did for a vacation?

Michael Calore: I went snorkeling on the moon.

Lauren Goode: Incredible.

Michael Calore: It really was.

Lauren Goode: Wow. Did you post it to the ‘Gram? Wow, I'm impressed. OK. Well, you chose a good week to come back because it's model week. Lots of models here.

Michael Calore: There's models here?

Lauren Goode: We're going to talk about models.

Michael Calore: Excuse me.

Lauren Goode: Your eyes just lit up.

Michael Calore: I mean, are they hiding behind the magazines? I don't see any models.

Lauren Goode: I hate to break it to you. We're going to talk about some really nerdy stuff. These are AI models.

Michael Calore: Oh, OK.

Lauren Goode: It's a big week for OpenAI. By the way, they released two new open-weight models earlier this week. These are models that have set parameters around them, but they also give developers a little bit more access to the inner workings of them so that can tinker with them and build on them and stuff like that. And then a lot of folks are excited this week about GPT-5.

Michael Calore: GPT-5?

Lauren Goode: Yeah. Which is coming out.

Michael Calore: And that's a big batch of releases, I imagine that we're going to go hands-on with them at some point.

Lauren Goode: We are, yeah. One of our colleagues, Reece Rogers, is planning on putting GPT-5 to the test. And just before this, he was doing some tests of these really expensive AI services, like $200 per month.

Michael Calore: Yes. The top tier ones that cost, yes, 200, $250 a month like ChatGPT Pro. And then there's Claude Max and there's so many more. And we are very lucky to have Reece here on the show with us today to tell us about them.

Reece Rogers: Howdy, howdy. Thanks for having me today. And of course a big welcome back to Mike.

Michael Calore: Thank you. Thank you. I wasn't gone that long, guys, but seriously, thank you. I very much appreciate it. So Reece, I'm really glad you're here today because the services that we're going to be talking about are a far cry from the $10 a month, $20 a month subscriptions that people are used to paying for things like streaming music, streaming video, cloud storage. We are officially now in the era of the $200 per month software subscription. So real quick before we get started, what is the craziest request that you've processed using a pro-level AI subscription? And was it worth it?

Reece Rogers: Yes. This definitely isn't anywhere near close to your Netflix subscription cost, but yes, using OpenAI's $200 Pro plan, when the ChatGPT agent first dropped, I tested the guardrails to see whether it would shop on an adult website and see how good its picks were. And let's just say I didn't get any of the toys.

Lauren Goode: Wait, wait. OK. By picks you don't mean picks like photos. You mean picks like picking up products for you?

Reece Rogers: Yes. I wanted to see what kind of products it would do, and it searched for about 20 minutes and it picked some all right things.

Lauren Goode: What did it pick?

Reece Rogers: No, actually—

Michael Calore: This is a family podcast.

Reece Rogers: This is a family—

Lauren Goode: If your kids are in the car—

Reece Rogers: It's too much. Too much.

Lauren Goode: ... turn it off right now. No, tell us. What did it pick?

Reece Rogers: I mean, it just picked a lot of cock rings, so I feel like I can't say that. Do you want me to say a different one for this answer?

Lauren Goode: You can totally say that.

Michael Calore: This is WIRED's Uncanny Valley, a show about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley. Today we're talking about why some chatbot subscriptions are so expensive, whether it's ChatGPT Pro or Claude Max, these premium subscriptions often cost around $200 a month with the promise that if you pay top dollar, you'll get access to the most powerful models these companies can provide. But why the AI companies have settled on this price range for their chatbots is less clear. WIRED's Reece Rogers went looking for answers and he found that these premium prices were determined on vibes more than anything substantial. But this vibes-based pricing reveals a lot about how AI companies are thinking about the future of their profitability and how they're hoping that users and companies will increasingly rely on these products. I'm Michael Calore, director of Consumer Tech and Culture.

Lauren Goode: I'm Lauren Goode, I'm a senior correspondent.

Reece Rogers: And I'm Reece Rogers, a staff writer who focuses on software.

Michael Calore: So Reece and Lauren, let's get started by first going through the AI services that we're actually talking about here.

Reece Rogers: Yeah, so we've already briefly mentioned OpenAI's ChatGPT Pro, which is $200 a month and was the first one to come out. In April of this year, Anthropic also dropped their Claude Max plan, which has a $200 monthly option. They promote Claude Max as having way more usage per session than previous versions, and this is really aimed at coders. Coders love Claude. Google, also, not to be left out, got into the game not too long after with their AI Ultra plan. This one's a little bit more expensive at 250, but you get 30 terabytes of storage and a few other perks. So that's really leaning into the Google Cloud services of it all.

Lauren Goode: Interesting. Storage as in just your Google Cloud account, your drive and your photos and things like that, plus this super smart chatbot.

Reece Rogers: Google's like, "We have everything. Let's just throw the whole book at them."

Lauren Goode: OK.

Reece Rogers: And then on the smaller end, there's Cursor, which is well known for AI assisted coding, they have a $200 plan. And Perplexity, which is a fairly popular startup that's racing to become the Google of AI era AI search. They also released a premium version called Perplexity Max, which surprisingly, $200 a month. So if you're thinking about what do these have in common? New features usually come to the most expensive tier first. So if you're not paying for the models, you're not getting the newest features as soon as they come out. Also, these premium products are often advertised as the most powerful version of these company's models, sometimes with even special models just for the Pro users. So you're getting unlimited access almost to as many prompts as you want. And a lot of people do want that that are power users, though this can be quite expensive for the companies that are providing them.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, we're going to talk about that later on the show, too. When you say prompts, I just want to make clear for folks, I think a lot of our listeners have used these services, but basically it's a query, it's a search. It's like imagine if in the era of Google search, in the early days, Google started charging you per query that you were putting in and some of your search results came back slow and others came back much more quickly because you were paying for access to that premium service.

Reece Rogers: Absolutely.

Lauren Goode: It's that, but now it's generative AI responses.

Reece Rogers: And it's also coders sitting on their computer for 10 hours a day using the tool the whole time.

Lauren Goode: Oh yeah, they're all about the code, Jen.

Reece Rogers: So this is really about the power users who want to sit there and they want to use the AI all day long potentially and get the most powerful version.

Lauren Goode: Reece, there's one that you didn't mention.

Reece Rogers: Mm?

Lauren Goode: Grok. Elon Musk's Grok. It's actually one of the priciest out there. It's $300 per month. It's also the weirdest.

Reece Rogers: Yes.

Lauren Goode: One of our colleagues gave it a spin and the chatbot was flirty and suggestive and weird. There are special settings within Grok where you can interact with custom characters designed for flirtatious chatter. It's like the fever dream of a billionaire who's ... Anyway. It's interesting because we also wrote a story on Wire.com earlier this month about how the chatbot went off the rails and was a spewing anti-Semitic content. It's wild, and I think this is a good example of how the culture of different companies can be reflected in their consumer facing products and maybe it's indicative of how some of them are putting a certain price point on them and saying they're, quote, unquote, "premium", but premium becomes a little bit subjective. What is actually high quality?

Reece Rogers: Yes, and I don't know if I would consider Grok's output to be the highest of high quality. Definitely with what we've learned throughout our reporting, I think that xAI's super Grok plan is $300 and they're really leaning into what most people consider to be one of the more toxic aspects of AI chatbots right now, which is this sexy AI element.

With OpenAI's Pro Plan, I was really trying to dig at the edge of the guardrails and what it would allow me to do, but if you log into Grok and you're using the highest tier plan there, you don't even have to push at the guardrails to get these very adult X-rated answers out of the tool. It's even, advertises having a not safe for work mode. So I think Grok's anime girl companion, she's designed to entice, she twirls around, she shows off her underwear. It's targeted at this male user base that's probably pretty online, very lonely, and unfortunately quite comfortable with the objectification of women. So when I think about xAI, it's taking a very different approach. I mean, if you compare it to OpenAI right now, they keep talking about how they're not optimizing for engagement and they're actually exploring more avenues for potentially protecting users or not really leaning into these stickier, grosser aspects in the chatbots.

Michael Calore: So they all have different objectives, but they all have around the same price. $200 seems to be the price that most of the companies are zeroing in on and some are charging a little bit more than that. And Reece, one of the main things that you wanted to find out when you went in to test all of these top tier subscriptions is why they had settled on this price range. Does $200 make sense? So what did you find? Is $200 the level where AI companies can make real money?

Reece Rogers: No. I just want to get that out of the way.

Lauren Goode: Thanks for listening to our show, folks. That's it for today.

Reece Rogers: When I go into a reporting project, you sometimes think it's going to be a complicated answer, that there's going to be tons of nuance. And I think reporting this one out, it really was that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman decided on the $200 price tag when they were the first movers on this top tier space and everyone just followed at that price range. He was even open that they weren't at launch making money on this, and I haven't gotten any other information to suggest that they are now making a profit because these generative AI tools are resource intensive to run, they're quite costly with startups rapidly burning through cash. But much like how OpenAI defined the consumer market for chatbots with the release of ChatGPT, Altman's $200 price tier for ChatGPT Pro was copied by everyone else though it is super critical to note, as I answered at the beginning, none of these companies I talked with spoke about making a profit off of these plans at the $200 price tag.

Lauren Goode: Reece, you and I actually had a pretty interesting call with Anthropic for this story and asked this product manager various ways how they landed on this price point and couldn't really get a clear answer. And we weren't sure whether that was because this product manager wasn't at the level where they could speak to those executive decisions or if it was because it is a giant shruggy in the industry. We're fast following everyone else here and let's just see what we can get. And also let's maybe start to introduce your consumers to this idea or Pro-sumers to this idea that they're going to have to pay a lot more for software.

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Reece Rogers: And Lauren, you tried to ask him every way possible and you were getting nothing back. None of those financial decisions were going to be revealed.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, those prompts would've been very costly because I just kept sending them in.

Michael Calore: So all of the AI companies are billing these top tier chatbot subscriptions as far superior to the free versions or the ones that cost 1/10 of the price. You've used most of them. And I want to ask, do they live up to the hype? Are they worth the money?

Reece Rogers: It really depends on who you ask. If you're a power user, especially a software developer or other nerd living in San Francisco, it could very much be worth it for you to have access to these capabilities that you can use as much as you want, basically. But if you're an average user, it's probably very tough to justify spending that amount of money on one subscription really for anything. I spoke with Allie K. Miller for this reporting. She's an influential business consultant. If you see a business going AI first, I bet she's whispered to them. So she's used all these really expensive plans and she sorts who actually pays the $200 into two core groups. First you have the faction of Silicon Valley insiders who want to feel like new world explorers. They got money to burn and they just want to try it out and kind of seem cool in their social circle. This is the glassholes. These are the people who bought the Apple Vision Pro.

But then the second and potentially larger group are those who believe they're getting their money's worth. They're getting a return on the investment. They're building software, they're developing an app. Or maybe even in Perplexity's case, they say that a lot of the people paying for their $200 a month plan are professionals, potentially financial people or investment bankers who want to stay up to date with very rapid information. So I think there's a large swath of people that are using these and are very happy paying $200 a month, but at the same time, it's not broken out into the mainstream. The average person is not paying $200 a month for a chatbot, but these companies are hoping that these premium features, these more potentially powerful models that are coming out, they hope that they will eventually be able to get a larger adoption rate from people who could see these as actually instrumental to their daily decision-making.

Lauren Goode: It's interesting that you mentioned Google's bundle earlier because that to me just seems to make the most sense. So if you're OpenAI, you must be thinking about the various products and services that you can offer right now to build out a suite in order to get people, and so you're not just telling them you get this supersmart, fast-reasoning version of ChatGPT. OK, great, but maybe you also get email, you also get deep research. You also get, I don't know, something that does your laundry for you, but you have to be thinking that way.

Reece Rogers: Absolutely. I mean, one of their recent releases is saying that they can make slide decks and Excel sheets within their AI tool showing that they know they're looking to expand beyond just a question and answer chatbot format.

Lauren Goode: I know a woman who is paying for one of the expensive chatbots. I'm pretty sure it's ChatGPT, and she was telling me about how she had to do some personal finance. She gave it a list of the different credit cards that she uses and had it go look up their APYs and their different points and perks and then gave it her monthly expense, gave the ChatGPT her monthly expenses and basically said, "Which card should I allocate these expenses to in order to make the most money?" She said it's fantastic. It basically saved her what she'd spent on the software.

Reece Rogers: Wow.

Lauren Goode: That was a hyper-specific example.

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Reece Rogers: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: Yeah.

Reece Rogers: I mean, that's going back to the Anthropic conversation. The Anthropic product person also mentioned that they had used it to decide what kind of mortgage they wanted for their house, and they said they saved more than $200 a month from that decision.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, incredible flex.

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Reece Rogers: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: Working for Anthropic, living in San Francisco, median home prices, what, over a million dollars? And they're like, "Well, I had to figure out that mortgage."

Michael Calore: So all of these are pretty fringe examples for sure. And Reece, the $200 question is are any of these worth it for the average person? It seems like the answer is no.

Reece Rogers: I would say that not only does the average person not need one of these subscriptions, the business financials behind everything is so murky that I'm not even sure whether this $200 price tag will stick around for much longer.

Michael Calore: Oh, it's going to go up?

Reece Rogers: It's going to go up, maybe. I don't know if these companies can even afford to offer these plans, so whether it might go up, but even at a higher price tier, it's unclear how much these cost.

Michael Calore: Wow. Well, Reece, thank you for joining us today and walking us through it.

Reece Rogers: Thank you so much. Always love my time in the WIRED library.

Lauren Goode: We always love seeing the real Reece Rogers here, not the AI version.

Reece Rogers: Thank you for having me.

Michael Calore: Let's take a quick break, but when we come back, Lauren and I will dive into how these premium subscriptions pencil out for the AI companies that are offering them and what these subscriptions mean for the rest of us.

Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. Today we're talking about the AI premium chatbot subscriptions that are all 200 bucks a month or more. WIRED's Reece Rogers was just with us and he was telling us about what they offer and why they're priced that way, and we'll get to the question of whether these chatbots can be adopted in a more mainstream level. But first, Lauren, were you surprised that these chatbot prices were mostly decided on vibes?Lauren Goode: Honestly, no. It didn't surprise me. I think Reece and I both went into reporting on this pretty optimistic that someone would pull back the curtain and tell us what was going on, share some of the economics behind it, but ultimately it does really seem like it's vibes-based pricing. It's a little bit arbitrary.

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: I think why that answer is so acceptable at this stage is just because it doesn't seem like it's feasible that any of them would make real money off of a handful of early adopters paying $200 per month.

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: These services are just all so expensive. You have the capital expenditure of these tech companies building the frontier models like Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic. They're spending literally billions of dollars on infrastructure, talent, R&D. For example, just because it's recent and Meta is a publicly traded company that's required to share its financials every quarter, Meta said it's expected to spend between 66 and $72 billion on AI infrastructure this year alone. That's up $30 billion from last year.

Michael Calore: That's insane amount.

Lauren Goode: This is the kind of spend that these companies have right now. It's expensive to provide these services. And even if these companies were able to convert more everyday people into power users who are willing to pay multiple hundred dollars a month for AI access, it's a pretty tough sell. It remains unclear when that actually nets out, how long it would be or how many people they'd have to get into paying for that before it actually makes sense.

Michael Calore: Yeah. I think a useful analog here is to think about ride sharing, right? Because when Uber and Lyft first came onto the scene, particularly here in San Francisco, they were involved in this price war and you could take Ubers that seemed like ridiculously cheap, and we were all figuring out in real time like, oh, they're subsidizing this because they want us to use their product.

Lauren Goode: That's right. The VCs were basically subsidizing our lifestyles. I remember someone wrote an article about that. It might've been in WIRED.

Michael Calore: Yes, it may have been you even.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. I do-

Michael Calore: So there's this situation where companies have all of this money and all they really need to do is get people to use it and get hooked on it and get reliant on it so that they can bring the price up over time or maybe they keep the prices, as you said, they're able to scale up to the point where they can keep the price exactly where they set it, just completely based on a hunch. Also, I think it's interesting that we're talking about the price of subscriptions because right now a lot of people are feeling subscription fatigue. You have subscribed to so many things that you probably could not count how many subscriptions you're paying out.

And most of those are around 20 bucks a month. So the idea that something is $200 a month seems very expensive to you as an individual because you're already just overwhelmed with how much money you're doling out for things you don't own. And now it's everywhere in the corporate world. You look at subscription licenses for Pro level software and they're very expensive. So if you're a company and you're looking at paying a monthly subscription for software, $200 is not really that much, particularly for something that promises doing the work that human assistants could do, and that's way cheaper.

Lauren Goode: What I hear you saying though is that there's still going to be a sticker shock for consumers who are used to paying $20 per month and the business users.

Michael Calore: Yes.

Lauren Goode: They're spending so much money to make this AI.

Michael Calore: They really are.

Lauren Goode: And I think it just goes back to what you said that we all got, all of us as a society, as a tech-embracing society to some extent got used to this idea that software is just meant to scale, scale, scale and scale as quickly as possible. And it doesn't really, quote, unquote, "matter if the companies are profitable." Someday they might be. You're making this future bet, and I think this is just the biggest future software bet we've probably ever lived through.

Michael Calore: Yeah, and I think a large component of that bet is the fact that the companies who are selling these subscriptions are also selling, they're selling a bargain to the company because they're saying, "If you pay us $200 a month, you don't have to hire somebody to do your spreadsheets, to do your emails." Our colleague Paresh Dave did a deep dive earlier this year where he found that AI chatbots could replace entry-level engineers, and as we've talked about on the show, there are AI agentic systems that can make sales calls. They can write software code, they can write all your emails for you. They can schedule everything for you in Slack. This is all work that was once done by humans now being done by a computer that you're only paying $200 a month for even just not accounting for any of the add-on features, that cost of hundreds of dollars a month is a fraction of what you pay for an assistant or a very junior level engineer.

Lauren Goode: Right. Yeah, I mean I think there are a few different things going on there with regards to jobs or replacing humans with AI. Yes, these services that are $200 per month are probably slightly underpriced if you are considering that versus hiring a human. Yes, AI is changing people's jobs right now in real time as we tape this podcast and it's changing our jobs, it's changing everything. Do I think it is capable of fully replacing a human yet at most jobs? Not really. Not yet. I just spent some time reporting out a story about vibe coding and talked to a bunch of engineers, and a lot of them are using these Codegen or AI assisted code tools, but they call them interns. They're still treating them like they have to manage something.

Michael Calore: No.

Lauren Goode: They can't fully do the job yet. Some of them are still bullish on humans. The idea is that it's not going to replace a hundred engineers. It's going to make a single engineer 100 times more productive.

Michael Calore: OK.

Lauren Goode: Do I agree with that? I don't know. I'm not a coder, but this is the way that people are doing mental gymnastics right now around AI. The other part of this though that I also think is true is that I think some employers who are laying off hordes of people right now because AI, I think it's bullshit. I think it's a very convenient excuse for them in the short-term. In the long-term, we are absolutely going to see, I think, disruption from jobs. And then I think people will look back at $200 per month software subscriptions and say, "Oh, remember the days when we were all paying just $200 for chatbots and talking about how expensive it was?" And it's like when the first iPhone came out or something, right? "Oh God, I'd never spend that much on a phone." And now we all do because it's such an integral part of our lives.

But right now, in this moment, it's really ironic when you have a giant tech company that's willing to spend $72 billion a year on AI infrastructure and then you cut a bunch of human roles, human jobs for efficiency reasons.

Michael Calore: Clap hands, snap fingers, big-up, and completely agree with you. I would love to get into a debate about this, but I can't because that was perfect.

Lauren Goode: No, debate me. We need tension on the show.

Michael Calore: What we need is a break and then we'll come back and do recommendations.

So Lauren, we have arrived at the part of our show where we share our personal recommendations for Uncanny Valley listeners. You get to go first this week. What is your recommendation?

Lauren Goode: My recommendation is courtesy of Sam Altman, the man of the hour.

Michael Calore: OK.

Lauren Goode: All right. Actually not. But last fall I went to an event for Worldcoin, which is Sam Altman's other company. It was a super weird vibey crypto eye-scanning thing at a warehouse in the Mission District of San Francisco.

Michael Calore: The orb?

Lauren Goode: This party had everything. Yeah. But there was swag there and there was a really nice sweatshirt that had World emblazoned on it, and I looked at the label and it's by a company called Original Favorites, and so I ordered one. So I have the Sam Altman Worldcoin sweatshirt without the World logo on it. I'm showing it to you right now.

Michael Calore: Yeah. This is what you're wearing.

Lauren Goode: And I love this sweatshirt. It is like in the '90s when you used to buy sweatshirts and they were so rough and tough, they almost felt like cardboard?

Michael Calore: Yes.

Lauren Goode: Like good old Champion sweatshirts, you know what I mean?

Michael Calore: Yes.

Lauren Goode: That feeling. And you'd wash it a hundred times and it would still have that ... This is what this is.

Michael Calore: It looks fabulous.

Lauren Goode: Thank you.

Michael Calore: Congratulations.

Lauren Goode: Mike, what's your recommendation?

Michael Calore: Oh, gosh. I'm going to recommend some stand-up comedy for our times.

Lauren Goode: Do it.

Michael Calore: It's the new Marc Maron stand-up special that's on HBO. It came out a week ago or so. It's called Panicked and it is quite good. In particular, I'm recommending it because there's a fantastic riff, like right in the middle, a whole bit about the app Watch Duty, which is the app that people use to track wildfires and became very popular in Los Angeles at the beginning of 2025 when LA was devastated by all of the wildfires. Well, Marc tells the story about how he had Watch Duty and he could not understand the notifications in the app, and he didn't know whether or not he should evacuate, so he grabbed all of his cats and evacuated and just absolutely did not need to. And it's this really fun long story, but it's also just very good. The whole thing is very good. If you're familiar with Marc Maron's comedy, you'll know that he's very dark and this special does get very dark, particularly in the second half, but I can highly recommend it. If you know him and you like him, you will love it.

Lauren Goode: Adding it to the watch list.

Michael Calore: Great.

Lauren Goode: Adding it to Watch Duty. Our guy, Boone Ashworth, who used to produce this show for us, he wrote a feature story this year about Watch Duty, too.

Michael Calore: He did. He did.

Lauren Goode: So we'll include that in the show notes.

Michael Calore: Yes.

Lauren Goode: And Mike, you're never leaving us again, right? No more vacations for you ever?

Michael Calore: Never ever.

Lauren Goode: Thank God.

Michael Calore: I'll be sitting here behind the microphone until the end of time.

Lauren Goode: The best chatbot there is.

Michael Calore: Thanks for listening to Uncanny Valley. If you liked what you heard today, make sure to follow our show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. If you would like to get in touch with us with questions, comments, or shows suggestions, write to us at [email protected]. Today's show is produced by Adriana Tapia and Marc Leyda. Amar Lal at Macrosound mixed this episode. Marc Leyda is our SF Studio engineer. Meghan Herbst fact-checked this episode. Daniel Roman fact-checked this episode. Kate Osborne is our executive producer. Katie Drummond is WIRED's global editorial director and Chris Bannon is Condé Nast's head of Global Audio.