Where's the Fun in AI Gambling?

Online gambling is on the rise, and AI is entering the field. This week, hosts Lauren and Mike speak with senior writer Kate Knibbs to discuss how, from startups to traditional gambling sites, industry players are promoting AI agents with the promise of helping users make better bets.

Join us live in San Francisco on September 9. Get your tickets here.

Mentioned in this episode:
“Meet the Guys Betting Big on AI Gambling Agents,” by Kate Knibbs
“Volodymyr Zelensky’s Clothing Has Sparked a Polymarket Rebellion,” by Joel Khalili and Kate Knibbs

You can follow Michael Calore on Bluesky at @snackfight, Lauren Goode on Bluesky at @laurengoode, and Kate Knibbs on Bluesky at @knibbs. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Michael Calore: Hey, this is Mike. Before we start, I want to share some exciting news with you. We're doing a live show in San Francisco on September 9th. It's in partnership with our local station KQED. Our editor-in-chief, Katie Drummond, will interview Jack Conte, the CEO of Patreon. Then Lauren and I will join the stage for a special roundtable edition that you won't want to miss. You can use the link in the show notes to grab your ticket and invite a friend, and we cannot wait to see you there. Hey, Lauren.

Lauren Goode: Hi, Mike.

Michael Calore: How's it going?

Lauren Goode: Well, we've officially entered the post-Labor Day season. It's bingo season where you get to play a little game called What Has my Boss Said About Q4? We're going to finish strong this year, folks, that's one. I know you're tired, I'm tired, but we've got to push through. We've got to close out some things before the end of the year. We're rushing towards the holiday season. Get all of your ducks in a row. This is what I hear from everybody, all my friends, “Oh, my boss is saying this this week.”

Michael Calore: This is the post-Labor Day vibe now.

Lauren Goode: Yep. It is.

Michael Calore: It's back to hustle.

Lauren Goode: We're in it.

Michael Calore: As if August wasn't hustle enough.

Lauren Goode: Right. As if we were all just, I don't know, lounging in our hammocks for the past several months. Yes, but I'm great. I'm really good.

Michael Calore: Great.

Lauren Goode: Ready for the hustle. How about you?

Michael Calore: I'm doing fantastic. I went and got all my steps this weekend.

Lauren Goode: Oh, how many?

Michael Calore: I don't know. 6,001.

Lauren Goode: I don't get it. That's not that many.

Michael Calore: It isn't? I don't know.

Lauren Goode: No, I hate to break it to you. I'm not judging.

Michael Calore: I don't wear any tracking stuff anymore. You wear two, right? You wear an Apple Watch and a Ring.

Lauren Goode: I wear a Garmin watch and a Ring.

Michael Calore: A Garmin watch and a Ring, and now you've got your camera glasses. Do those also track your …

Lauren Goode: Oh, these are the Meta glasses that I figure I should give them a spin finally. I've had them for over a year. No, under a year. Just under a year. They look terrible on me.

Michael Calore: They look good on you.

Lauren Goode: No, I just put them on and I'm taking them off again. They look terrible.

Michael Calore: I can call you six eyes now.

Lauren Goode: That's right.

Michael Calore: Because they have two cameras.

Lauren Goode: You know what? Maybe we should get to the podcast.

Michael Calore: Maybe we should. We have Kate Knibbs on the show today, the one and only Kate Knibbs …

Lauren Goode: Knibbs.

Michael Calore: ... WIRED senior writer to talk about some of her latest reporting on AI and gambling. Kate, how are you doing?

Kate Knibbs: I'm good. Thank you so much for having me. I feel like you guys are missing the big thing that's happening soon, which is it's football season, baby. We are entering the time of year where sports matter. OK. Q4, NFL, we love it.

Lauren Goode: That's right.

Kate Knibbs: I actually don't really love it, but I'm happy for everyone who does, and I am playing fantasy football kind of against my will this year. But yeah, it's sports season, and I'm here to talk about a sports story.

Michael Calore: Fantastic. As a baseball person, this is my sad season.

Kate Knibbs: I forgot about baseball.

Michael Calore: Because the teams I support never get any further than the end of September.

Kate Knibbs: That's okay. I'm a White Sox fan, so I relate.

Lauren Goode: Oh, Kate. I had an uncle who pitched for the White Sox.

Kate Knibbs: OK. We have to talk about that later.

Lauren Goode: A long time ago. A long time ago.

Michael Calore: Let's get to the show.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. Let's do it.

Michael Calore: This is WIRED's Uncanny Valley, a show about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley. Today we're talking about the use of AI in gambling. Since a federal ban on sports betting in the United States was struck down seven years ago, the popularity of online gambling has skyrocketed. Last year, Americans spent over $150 billion betting on sports, with a big chunk of those wagers being made online. And of course, as artificial intelligence rolls through every industry, online gambling is being affected too. The current AI gold rush has incentivized some startups to create AI agents that are promising to help users make better bets, whether that's giving tips and advice, or actually directly executing the bets themselves. These AI agents are the new frontier in gambling. There's a lot of money and a lot of expectations riding on their success. I'm Michael Calore, director of consumer tech and culture.

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

Kate Knibbs: And I'm Kate Knibbs. I'm a senior writer.

Michael Calore: So Kate, tell us how you first started following this story. What attracted you to it other than the promise of making thousands and thousands of dollars?

Lauren Goode: Well, other than her well-documented gambling addiction.

Kate Knibbs: I'm not a big gambler, but I am a person who thinks all the time about ways that I could potentially get rich quick utilizing the latest tech. I never actually do anything with it, but I just like to think about it. I've been following this for a while. I originally pitched this story last December, I believe, it was a while ago, because I just sort of assumed with the boom and interest in AI agents that it was only a matter of time before it intersected with online gambling, because it seemed like a potential way for a lot of people to attempt to get rich quick. I have brothers who I would consider Barstool Sports brothers. They love to online gamble and they follow sports. And so I have people in my life who talk about parlays and stuff all the time. I just really wanted to see whether there were actual fortunes to be made in this space, or whether people would end up just losing way more money than they even were going to lose gambling because online gambling is a pretty corrosive industry that's pretty bad for our country. So I thought automating that was something that we should be paying attention to.

Lauren Goode: This may be a really obvious question, but walk that back a little bit. Why has online gambling been so bad for the US since it's been legalized?

Kate Knibbs: So people love to gamble. We are living through the golden age of scams and grifts and income inequality, and the potential to make money off of luck or strategy is just really appealing to people. It's fun for a lot of people. I see it as part of the larger story of the United States shifting towards this casino-like mentality about everything. It's sort of a victim of its own popularity in that it's really accessible now to anyone now that most states have legalized online gambling, and so the barriers to entry are frighteningly low. You used to have to get on a plane and go to Vegas to lose all of your money and go into crippling debt, and now you just have to log on. So it's a nightmare. It's a nightmare. I'm sure it's fun for people and some people can do it responsibly, but this is something that in the seven years that it's been legalized has ruined a lot of people's lives.

Michael Calore: So we've talked about AI agents on the show before, and broadly speaking, these are usually just web browsing agents and they're designed to go out onto the web, visit various websites and complete tasks for you independently. But in the context of gambling, what does an AI agent look like? How does it work?

Kate Knibbs: So that was one of the most interesting parts of following this little cottage industry develop over the past year, because there's not one definition of an AI agent that all of these startups are using. There's a pretty big spread of what these can do. And a lot of them are really just offering tips and advice. They're not placing the bets for people, and so those tend to work. Sometimes they're custom, sometimes they're basically like a wrapper for commonplace LLMs, but then they'll also have some sort of RAG capability where they'll pull real-time information. Like if a game is going on it will be able to see, if it's a baseball game for instance, how many strikes have happened, et cetera, whether the umpires have changed, things like that. And then they generate advice for people who are looking to gamble, that's one segment of this agentic AI gambling space. There's another segment that is attempting to take it a step further and actually place bets on behalf of people, and it's still pretty niche and experimental, in large part because AI agents can't control regular bank accounts or access the traditional banking sector. So they're not able to go on super mainstream sports books like FanDuel or DraftKings. So they're having to do this in the crypto space. So that's a more sophisticated and more legitimate agent use, but it's still essentially in beta.

Lauren Goode: So what you're describing is a world in which the more legitimate use case is an AI app wrapper that's wrapped around an LLM that is making near real-time bets on your behalf behind some black box algorithm and tapping into your crypto account to do it.

Kate Knibbs: Yes.

Lauren Goode: That's the legit version.

Kate Knibbs: Well, when I say legit, I more mean it's actually agentic in the way that we should be understanding agentic, instead of just saying something is an agent when it's really an LLM.

Lauren Goode: Right. OK.

Kate Knibbs: I'm not trying to say it's good. And then there's this third bucket of AI gambling agents that are doing things that are even weirder and are hybrids, and they're not placing bets on your behalf, but they're tokenized. So people are buying crypto tokens into the processes of these AI agents, but it's honestly so convoluted, and so there's this group of startups that are just trying to smash together crypto and AI agents and gambling and are offering what they're calling agents, but are in many cases basically promotional tools.

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: Huh.

Kate Knibbs: Yeah, it's strange.

Michael Calore: So let's talk about some of these startups in the story that you wrote for WIRED, which is online now and everybody can and should go read it. You give a pretty broad overview of a lot of the different startups that are operating in this space and that are competing with each other. One of them is called MonsterBet. The founder claims that the algorithm that he developed actually helps users beat the odds. The normal success rate for a sports bet is around 52 percent, and he claims that users are enjoying success rates of 56 to 60 percent.

Kate Knibbs: That is what he claims. There's been a lot of claims happening in this space. I will say it was pretty hard to find users of a lot of these platforms. There weren't that many people that I could find even using MonsterBet, no one seemed disgruntled. I haven't seen the hard proof that this is true, though.

Michael Calore: How much does something like MonsterBet cost?

Kate Knibbs: So he's charging $77 a month for people to have access to these tools. So that's also something you got to think about, it's like, not only does it have to do better than luck, it has to justify spending all this money upfront. You could win 60 bucks, but then you're still paying 77 bucks a month.

Lauren Goode: Right. And if you were paying, let's say $20 a month for ChatGPT Pro, presumably ChatGPT could also, it's not going to make bets on your behalf, but it could give you analysis that you'd want to place your bets. Right?

Kate Knibbs: Yeah. And there's a lot of people who are using ChatGPT and just more mainstream general-interest LLMs to get betting tips too. That is something that's also happening.

Lauren Goode: Right. Huh, that's interesting. So they're following a kind of similar monthly subscription model as premium chatbots. They also seem to share this penchant for flashy click-baity YouTube promotional videos, like “Here's how I made over $1,000 from my sports betting software yesterday.” This is just an incredible content flywheel, the YouTube to AI online gambling pipeline. Here's a clip of those videos.

[Archival audio]: In this video, I'll be going over how I built my own sports betting AI agent.

[Archival audio]: I am going to try and use the power of AI to take down an online casino.

[Archival audio]: This AI is about to place a $1,500 bet on tonight's basketball game. If it wins, I make $3,000 in pure profit. If it loses, I just burned $1,500. Should I actually do this?

Kate Knibbs: So one thing that's been really striking to me, because I've been covering a lot of different ways that people are using AI and not just in the gambling context, the videos that I saw a lot of these startups putting out really reminded me of other types of AI hustle culture content. They had a lot in common with videos I'd seen, for instance, about how to get rich quick making AI coloring books, how to get rich quick making AI children's cartoons. I see this as an extension of that genre rather than something distinct. I found so many different iterations of this startup concept that I only really included a small sampling of what I was seeing, and what I didn't find was anyone who had received a life-changing amount of money using these services. So I think that says a lot. Although if anyone's listening and has made a life-changing amount of money using this, email me, I'd love to talk.

Michael Calore: You reported that most of the seasoned players in the online gambling space are sticking to the first model that you mentioned, which is just making an agent that does the research and can make tips for what would be a good bet, but it leaves the final step of actually placing the bet in the hand of you, the person who's putting their money on the line. But how is it going for the companies and the users that are taking the riskier step of letting the AI agent actually place the bets?

Kate Knibbs: So those are definitely still in very experimental stages. Some people that I spoke with had already jettisoned attempts to do this. They just found that it was too difficult to make the agents place the bets. And it was interesting talking to them, just as someone who is newish to reporting on where agents are more broadly speaking in executing tasks for humans. Because it really made it clear to me that there is so much hype going on with what agentic AI is capable of doing. As much as we would all love to click a few buttons and have a robot book a flight for us for $500 off or whatever, we're just not there yet. The execution of having agents pay for stuff on our behalf, it's more theoretical than something that's happening for a bunch of normies at this point. It is something though that there is a lot of interest in, and from pretty big players in the crypto space. I went to Coinbase's headquarters actually while I was reporting this and talked to Lincoln Murr who is in charge of a lot of Coinbase's efforts with stuff. Coinbase is a big company, it's an influential company, and they are convinced that people are going to be using agents to buy things in the future, and, if they're so inclined, trade crypto, do prediction market bets, and gamble on sports. And so as much as I thought this is clearly not there yet, the reporting made me realize that there is some serious money behind the promise of this. There are people who really believe that this is where we're going.

Michael Calore: Yes, probably is where we're going just because the legalization of online gambling is going to keep opening up to more and more states, and the AI technology is going to keep getting better, and this intersection seems like there's a lot of money to be made. So are we looking at a future where agents just dominate sports betting completely?

Kate Knibbs: Here's the thing, though, the sports books don't want that to happen, obviously. Gambling is this industry where the house always wins. I think if the agents actually do get competent enough to start making money for people, there's going to be huge pushback from the FanDuels and DraftKings of the world, because that's going to be really bad for them. In the same way that if we are able to get AI agents that can ferret out fantastic flight deals for us, I suspect that we'll have major pushback from the airline industry on allowing those transactions to happen. So if an agent is actually capable of making bettors rich, then it's capable of bankrupting sports books, and that's going to be wildly disruptive to the industry.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. It's only OK if the airlines themselves use AI to do dynamic pricing. You however cannot dispatch an agent to combat that.

Kate Knibbs: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: It's also pretty fascinating that some of the elements of online gambling, they're just the same with AI or not. There are still going to be scams. Kate, I love the detail that you included about an AI gambling tip service that told half of its subscribers that one team will win and the other half that the other team will win, which is basically just telling the customer what they want to hear, banking that it's going to keep them happy and have them stick around to generate a profit. So it all seems pretty scammy right now.

Kate Knibbs: Yeah, I don't think that the sports books have that much to worry about at the moment.

Michael Calore: All right, let's take a break and when we come back, we're going to dive more into the potential upsides and the risks of mixing AI and online gambling, and we'll talk a little bit more about where these two industries are going. Stay with us.

[break]

Michael Calore: Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. Today we are talking all about AI agents and online gambling with Kate Knibbs. Kate, something you said at the top of this interview was that it was almost just a matter of time for AI agents and online gambling to mesh together. They're both rapidly growing, there's a lot of vested interest, and there's a lot of hype around them. What are some of the key factors that led us here?

Kate Knibbs: I really do think it is part of this bigger shift in our culture of attempting to find ways to profit off of technology that people are really worried is going to end up exploiting them. I've actually been a little surprised that the main movers of this have been startups. I thought maybe there would be more interest from the big sports books themselves. FanDuel has an AI chatbot that they launched to much fanfare that gives you tips that's not actually so different seeming from some of the so-called AI agents that the startups are putting forth. That's, to me, kind of just an obvious promotional tool because if I was going to be gambling, I wouldn't really trust the company that stands to benefit if I lose to give me tips on how I should be betting.

Lauren Goode: A lot of the hype around agent AI in Silicon Valley has been around productivity, like optimize everything, do more work, have the agent doing this task in the background while you're doing something else. Get ready for Q4, use agents to optimize your Q4. But it's no surprise that this is also taking up a lot of space in the commercial internet because the internet is fundamentally mercantilist. It started out as very idealist and look at this thing that is amazing and is going to help us connect with other humans, and ultimately it very rapidly became this mercantilist enterprise that we all live in now. And so of course it just makes sense. Gambling in a way is a form of shopping, and so here's an agent to help you buy the thing.

Kate Knibbs: This is so American that we're trying to optimize gambling.

Lauren Goode: Right.

Michael Calore: Aside from the larger socioeconomic societal risks, I want to hear about the actual risks to users, because it seems like there's a pretty compelling reason to use an AI agent for gambling. If you're good at it, you can make a quick buck quicker. But there are all kinds of risks, and I would love to know some of the fun stories about things that have gone terribly wrong.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. Kate, I love how you mentioned in your story that there were a couple sources you spoke to who said they just don't work, they just fail to place the bet in time, which kind of made me think of dispatching a bot to get you concert tickets and just never getting the tickets.

Kate Knibbs: The problem right now is that all of these companies are new, and people don't really know which ones are trustworthy or not. Some of the companies where you'll sign up for a subscription, you're running the risk of, well, what if they just stop giving me AI-generated tips and then make it really hard to cancel my subscription, which is something that I had heard had happened with some of these startups. And then the third bucket of startups that I was mentioning earlier that have the really convoluted business models. So one of them, which was formerly called Draift Kings, and then they had to change the name for legal reasons to Sire.

Lauren Goode: So it was like D-R-A-I-F-T?

Kate Knibbs: Yeah, it was like a …

Lauren Goode: No.

Kate Knibbs: So that's actually one of the startups that I think is the most interesting and has the most potential to actually make people money, but the way that it's planning to help make people money, because a lot of it's still in beta, it calls itself a hedge-fund-style service. So instead of just individually betting on sports, what you do is you buy a token, and an agent will place all sorts of bets on your behalf. It wouldn't just be on one sport, and then the returns for all of these bets that are being placed are then divvied up amongst the token holders and the people who put money into the wallets. And one of the ways that this company is planning to make money off of this is it's free to put money in, but you have to pay a “performance fee,” I think they call it, to extract your winnings, and buying the token makes the fee lower. So there seems to be a lot of different ways where this could not work out for the people who are putting their money in. You know what I mean?

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Kate Knibbs: We shall have to see how it all unfolds, because it just came out of beta.

Lauren Goode: Kate, another question I have for you, not about agents specifically, but what has all of this meant for Vegas? Are people still going? Are younger demographics just skipping the flights and the $20 drinks and gambling from their phones instead?

Kate Knibbs: Yeah, so I think the AI gambling thing is still too niche to have an effect on the Vegas economy. But there's been a huge drop-off in tourists visiting Vegas, and I think it does correlate partly to how commonplace internet gambling is, because why bother with a flight when you could do it on your phone and now you can also do it in person more places. And also I would wager, pun intended, that people just generally aren't doing that great. The macroeconomics of our country would be messing with Vegas' tourism as well. AI internet gambling, it's still too small to screw Vegas, but I'm sure it's not good for Vegas.

Michael Calore: If you love sports, gambling is fun. If you love to watch a game with your friends, it is that much more fun and you have that much more smack talk with your friends if you have money riding on the game or if several people have money riding on the game, even if it's like 15, 20, 30 bucks, you're very consumed, and it's a great way into this fun social setting. Of course, it is dangerous, and a lot of people do get addicted to it. But, I'm not going to lie here, it is fun for me to gamble small amounts of money on sports every once in a while because it increases the amount of fun that I have when I'm watching the game. So an AI agent takes some of that away, and it doesn't really feel like that's who it's for. Because the person who's going to be betting on the Bulls to win is always going to be betting on the Bulls to win, even if the AI agent is telling them that they're going to lose by 15 points or something like that. So it seems like what's been created is this mechanical device that just helps people automate the process of beating the odds and making money. So it seems like a tool made for people who don't like sports.

Lauren Goode: It's optimized everything. It's just optimizing for that experience.

Kate Knibbs: Yeah. I mean, if you're just someone who likes to wager with your friends, this is not going to affect your life at all. This isn't for the casual gambler who is truly doing it for entertainment purposes. This is not for the healthy gambler. This is for the unhealthy gambler who really is doing it as a way to try to improve their financial lot in life, which is never a good idea. So it's also I think, worth keeping an eye on for that reason. So you have nothing to worry about, Mike.

Michael Calore: I'm so glad.

Lauren Goode: Well, we're kind of in this era of vibes gambling anyway, not just on sports, right? Because Kate, you've written about the rise in popularity of Polymarket. I have not spent much time on Polymarket, but people are betting on everything. As of this recording, our producer went onto Polymarket and pulled some data. Some of the top polls are will Trump resign in 2025? “Resign” is doing a lot of work there. Who's going to win the US Open? Earlier this summer, there was a poll on whether Ukrainian president Zelensky would be wearing a suit for another meeting with Donald Trump. There was a collective $210 million on the line. I mean, we could bet on anything on Polymarket.

Michael Calore: Lauren, I refuse to believe that you didn't have a small amount of money on Travis and Taylor tying the knot.

Lauren Goode: Oh, I wish I thought of that.

Michael Calore: I'm sure that …

Lauren Goode: I mean, obviously they were going to do it before the season, right?

Michael Calore: Right.

Lauren Goode: Actually, what I would've bet on is what the real day was they got engaged, because I mean, we can assume that the day of the photo shoot was not the actual engagement. Right? Didn't his dad say like, oh yeah, it happened a couple weeks before?

Michael Calore: You've already lost me.

Lauren Goode: This is a Taylor Swift podcast now.

Michael Calore: I have no idea.

Lauren Goode: That would've been a fun one. I wonder how many people bet on that. But yeah, we're in a vibes society now for better or worse, and AI is just enabling that for us.

Michael Calore: All right. Well, let's take another break and we'll come right back with recommendations.

[break]

Michael Calore: Well, thank you both for a great conversation about AI agents and online gambling and just a little tiny bit of Taylor Swift—because we have to do it every time or else Lauren gets upset.

Lauren Goode: Not even remotely true. Lies.

Michael Calore: I would bet that our listeners are hungry for some recommendations. So Kate, as our guest of honor, you get to go first. What do you recommend this week?

Kate Knibbs: Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to talk about something that I am very passionate about at the moment as an extremely pregnant person, which is, Chicago's Mexican food. OK?

Michael Calore: Oh boy.

Lauren Goode: Oh.

Kate Knibbs: I know.

Lauren Goode: Oh boy, Mike is getting his back up against the wall here.

Kate Knibbs: I'm talking to two people in the Bay Area. I'm not disparaging your burritos. OK? They're excellent. You're great. California's got its own thing going.

Lauren Goode: Did you know Mike lives in the Mission?

Kate Knibbs: Yes.

Lauren Goode: Did you know he lives in the Mission? I'm just going to let you know because that's going to come up.

Kate Knibbs: OK. I just want the world to know, anyone listening, no matter where you are, that if you go to Chicago, sure, you should get our pizza. It's good. Whatever. Don't sleep on the Mexican food. We have excellent, life-changing Mexican food. I just had tamales for lunch from Gordo's Tamales. We have world-class Mexican food. People don't know about it. People don't talk about it, and you should know that. And when you guys come visit me, I'm going to take you for birria in addition to thin-crust pizza.

Lauren Goode: Ooh.

Michael Calore: Excellent.

Lauren Goode: And thin-crust. Oh, now she's throwing it down. Now she's like, look out East Coast, we've got thin-crust pizza too.

Michael Calore: I mean, I fully support this, that there's excellent Mexican food in Chicago because as a person who lives in San Francisco, I've had a really, really top-notch A-plus bagel in San Francisco. I have had some of the best pizza I've ever eaten in San Francisco. And you talk to New Yorkers and they act like those things do not exist on the other side of the Hudson River. Like you can't get good pizza anywhere other than New York, and I think that is patently false. So I'm not the person who says you can't get good Mexican food outside of the big cities in California, because you absolutely can. Chicago is a bit surprising, but I am going to accept that invitation.

Lauren Goode: I can't wait to visit

Michael Calore: Now, I'm starving. Lauren, what's your recommendation?

Lauren Goode: My recommendation is another podcast and it happens to be another Uncanny Valley podcast. I'm keeping it in the feed. Our global editorial director, Katie Drummond, has a new show. We've talked about it.

Michael Calore: We have.

Lauren Goode: And she interviewed Ben Collins, who is a journalist who ended up buying The Onion and has really reinvigorated The Onion. It's a really fun interview. I mean, they talk about what it's like to be a journalist in the age of overbearing government and how it's our job to hold power to account and some of the unique challenges and even fears that come with that. But then they talk about other stuff too. Why Ben was uniquely suited to take over The Onion and do the thing that he is doing. And he also talks about trying to buy Infowars. You all have to go, listen. Mike, what's yours?

Michael Calore: I'm going to recommend Alien Earth on Hulu. It's the new series in the Alien franchise, in the universe of aliens. It takes place about two years before the events of the first movie, the first Alien movie with Sigourney Weaver from the '70s. So we have not yet encountered the species that we all know and hate and love yet. But this is how it all begins, and it's a really fun story, and it's very well directed. The showrunner is Noah Hawley, who has done Fargo, among some other things for Hulu.

Lauren Goode: Oh, yeah.

Michael Calore: And this is a straight sci-fi. It involves people uploading their consciousness into synthetic bodies. It involves obviously space travel and cybernetic humans and surveillance. The weird and fun thing about it is that the governments are gone and the Earth is just run by five giant corporations now. Gives it a really modern …

Lauren Goode: Hits close to home.

Michael Calore: I should also mention it's extremely gory and kind of frightening. So if you like horror, it's for you. If you don't, it's not for you.

Kate Knibbs: I was going to ask that because I actually do like most of the Alien movies, even though I have to watch them from between my fingers. I don't know. I don't want to skip this one though. I'm going to try.

Lauren Goode: Thank you for that excellent recommendation.

Michael Calore: Thank you. Thanks, Kate.

Kate Knibbs: Sorry. Thank you so much for having me. It was a delight. I bet that this is going to be fun to listen back to.

Michael Calore: That's the last sports pun you're going to get. Thank you for listening to Uncanny Valley. If you like what you heard today, make sure to follow our show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. If you'd like to get in touch with us with any questions, comments, or show suggestions, you can write to us at uncannyvalley@WIRED.com. Today's show is produced by Adriana Tapia and Mark Lyda. Amar Lal and MacroSound mixed this episode. Mark Lyda is our San Francisco studio engineer. Matt Giles fact-checked this episode. Kate Osborne is our executive producer. Katie Drummond is WIRED's global editorial director. Chris Bannon is Condé Nast's head of global audio.