Why You Might Already Own SpaceX Shares, Siri’s AI Makeover, and Knicks Owner’s Surveillance Machine

This week on Uncanny Valley, our hosts discuss SpaceX officially going public and who will benefit the most from it, as well as Apple’s WWDC and the brand new release of Siri AI. They also get into how Meta removed a facial recognition feature after a WIRED report exposed it—and later in the show: an investigation into how New York Knicks’ owner James Dolan created an extensive surveillance system inside all of his Madison Square Garden properties.

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You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett and Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer. Write to us at [email protected].

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

Brian Barrett: Hey, this is Brian. Before we start, two quick things. If you've been enjoying listening to the show, would appreciate it if you took a second to rate it in your app of choice. It really helps us reach more people. Second, if you have any questions related to tech, privacy, or politics that you would like me, Zoë, and Leah to take on, now is the time to submit them to [email protected]. It doesn't matter how big or how small we want to hear from you and get you answers. OK, onto the show. I'm a little tired, but it's because I got to see Lionel Messi play soccer last night and score a goal on a penalty kick.

Zoë Schiffer: That's really fun.

Brian Barrett: Yeah. It was a friendly of Argentina versus Iceland. You'll never guess who won.

Zoë Schiffer: I literally won't. No. No.

Brian Barrett: It was Argentina. Zoë.

Zoë Schiffer: Got it. OK. Is that an obvious thing?

Brian Barrett: They're very good at soccer.

Zoë Schiffer: Cool. That's so nice for them. Happy for them. Welcome to WIRED’s Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoë Schiffer, director of business and industry.

Brian Barrett: And I'm Brian Barrett, executive editor. On today's show, we're discussing Apple's key releases from their annual developer conference, especially the company's long awaited AI makeover for Siri. It's far from their first attempt, but it's going to stick this time.

Zoë Schiffer: We're also taking an early look at the SpaceX IPO this week, which is slated to become the world's largest IPO of all time. We'll get into who is slated to benefit the most. Elon Musk, who is already the world's richest man, but on track to become even richer and why you might find yourself among the investors without even realizing it.

Brian Barrett: And in case you missed it, WIRED reporters recently uncovered that Meta had silently embedded code that would power a face recognition system for its smart classes in the Meta AI app on millions of people's phones. A day after we reported that story, Meta removed the code. We'll talk about how all that unfolded.

Zoë Schiffer: And later in the show, for all of the basketball fans who've been glued to the NBA finals, we have a special guest who will tell us about his investigation into Madison Square Garden's surveillance system.

Brian Barrett: So Zoë, another week that we get to talk about a developer conference.

Zoë Schiffer: I know. Leah's away, and wow, have you taken advantage of that situation?

Brian Barrett: Oh yeah. No, yeah. I'm pushing it through. You were so thrilled about Google IO. This week we've got WWDC.

Zoë Schiffer: I will say slightly more excited because Apple, as you and I have discussed many times, bit of a laggard in the AI race and I feel like this was their opportunity to tell the world what has changed since the last developer conference.

Brian Barrett: For people who aren't familiar with WWDC, this is Apple's annual event where it gathers a bunch of developers from all over the world and they announced upcoming releases and changes to their software for the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac. This year, the biggest announcement, which as we said, has been their biggest announcement the last couple of years, was around Siri. They're rebranding it as Siri AI. Siri was always an AI product, but now they're for real serious about it. And it's a ground up rebuild or so they're billing it of Apple's voice assistant. This version of Siri will be powered by the next generation of Apple intelligence, which is Apple's personal AI system. All of this probably sounds familiar and that's because we've heard it before. Apple's senior VP of software engineering Craig Federighi first announced Apple Intelligence back in 2024 at the WWDC keynote.

Craig Federighi, archival audio: We are embarking on a new journey to bring you intelligence that understands you. And there are already some really impressive chat tools out there that perform a vast array of tasks using world knowledge, but these tools know very little about you or your needs.

Brian Barrett: And they would still not for some time. Again, in 2025, more promises for even more powerful AI or really AI that was powerful at all and hinting at a rebirth for Siri.

Craig Federighi, archival audio: We're continuing our work to deliver the features that make Siri even more personal. We're making the generative models that power Apple intelligence more capable and more efficient.

Brian Barrett: Zoë, this is so much like when you and I are both reporters and editors to a certain extent, but it's very familiar when you are in a situation where you're going to your editor and saying, "I'm just going to do a little more reporting. I have made so much progress on this story, but I just need another week or two for more calls."

Zoë Schiffer: A tiny bit more time. Just a little more time. I will say, distracted by how smooth Craig's voice sounds, he must practice so much for that.

Brian Barrett: Well, and this is an audio medium, but his hair is also famously, I think, the best hair in Silicon Valley.

Zoë Schiffer: Yes.

Brian Barrett: So Craig has a lot going for him, just not Siri capabilities. But the changes brought by both of these announcements were underwhelming to say the least and to say the most, we should point out that about a month ago Apple agreed to pay a settlement of $250 million for a class action lawsuit that basically said that Apple intelligence is not that intelligent. It's not living up to the promises that Apple made. So it's sort of a situation of fool me once shame on me, fool me twice shame on you, fool me three times.

Zoë Schiffer: Go to Google and make a deal so you can actually be intelligent.

Brian Barrett: Exactly. So yeah, that's what has happened. Now Apple is going to rely largely on Google Gemini to help power Apple intelligence under the hood. Zoë, what do you make of that?

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I mean, I think it makes a lot of sense. Frontier models are really expensive and difficult to build. Google has already done it pretty successfully. I think if you look at, say, enterprise coding models, Gemini is not the best of the best, but in a lot of other ways it is quite cutting edge. And so yeah, it makes sense these two companies have worked together before to great effect for both of them. I was curious and have been kind of chatting with sources at both companies to see, is this partnership long-term? Has Apple thrown in the towel permanently and just said, "This is fine. We'll rely on it." Or are they furiously working in the background to try and build up their frontier capabilities and eventually make Siri run on Apple technology start to finish? People are, as you might expect, being very tight-lipped about that and they haven't really said what the long-term future of this product is going to be.

Brian Barrett: I'll say two things that if you dig a little deeper, not that much deeper, but a little deeper into the documentation from the conference, two things really stand out to me about Apple's approach to AI in this snapshot moment. One is a sort of relentless focus on on- device AI. So where Apple has been putting in time and work in a way that's showing publicly right now is finding ways to make as much of the AI capabilities as possible happen on your device so that it doesn't go back to Apple. No one knows what you're doing or that there is a privacy angle to it. The other thing that was interesting to me—also privacy—is that for the first time, and a reason why Google makes a good partner is that Apple has something called private cloud compute. They rolled it out two years ago. It is a fancy, very technical way to be a privacy preserving AI service. It has made a deal and worked with Google and NVIDIA to make private cloud compute work on Google Cloud. So previously all of these things happened on Apple Cloud. Now you've got the infrastructure to support as well, which I suspect Google was in a better position to provide than some of the other competitors that would've been on their radar.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. So this was kind of my takeaway for what is their big value proposition in addition to saying this version of Siri is actually going to work and be intelligent. They're also saying in parentheses, unlike all the other companies, we are really focused on privacy. And I think in this moment where there's a lot of open questions around if you are a lawyer and you're speaking to a chatbot, are those conversations private or are they discoverable if there's a court case if you—

Brian Barrett: And by the way, they are discoverable.

Zoë Schiffer: Yes, they are. That's not an open question. Yeah. But basically how private are your communications with chatbots? And the reason that this is so critical is people aren't just having work conversations. They're using the same technology to help with their homework as they are to have very private mental health conversations or what have you. And so this idea that if you're using an Apple device, you can trust a little more that it's just staying on your device. It's not bouncing around to different places. It can't be intercepted as easily. I think that makes a lot of sense. And I will say Apple has gotten, this is a stand that they have taken again and again. And I think that while it has gotten them in some hot water, for example, when they refused to put a back door in an iPhone that would've allowed the FBI to hack into the phone of someone who had committed a very serious crime, they've kind of stuck to their guns overall and been like, no, privacy is our core differentiator. And I will say having talked to a lot of people at that company, they really seem to live it and believe it there even though there are clearly trade-offs at times.

Brian Barrett: Yeah. It's definitely predated AI, the privacy focus. And it also plays to their strengths in other ways too, or rather plays to their weaknesses in some ways. Siri AI is going to be better. Our reporters who have played with it a little bit have indicated, yeah, it can do things now. You can actually have a back and forth conversation with it. It can pull context from your emails and messages and photos and sort of know more about you, again, all within the context of your advice, but it's really table stakes stuff, right? It's, Siri's going from being annoying and bad to probably being basically usable. So you need something else in there.

Zoë Schiffer: Exactly. I was kind of curious about this decision to just stick with the Siri branding because I feel like Siri has been around for so long. It has such a bad reputation at this point of just being not that useful. They have tried now multiple times to insert AI into it and been completely mocked and derided for their failures there. I was like, at this point, I might just start fresh, say we have a completely new assistant, it's got a new name, but no, they're sticking with the branding.

Brian Barrett: Well, I wonder too how much they need Siri AI to be that to my mind if I'm Apple, which I'm not, but I think about this as the iPhone is going to be the AI device. So we just need an experience that is good enough for people who want the default. If you want to use OpenAI, if you want to use ChatGPT, you've got your iPhone. You're going to do that on your iPhone regardless of what device Jony Ive and Sam Altman are cooking up. They own the main portal through which you're going to experience these things no matter what.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. For now, for now. For now. OK. So we're going to see these changes roll out in the United States. They're not going to roll out in Europe or in China. Is that right?

Brian Barrett: That's right. And that's happened before either from delays or not rolling out at all just because the European regulatory environment is a lot more strict than it is in the US. There are a few laws in there. There's the Digital Markets Act, which requires large tech companies to make their products interoperable, which means they have to be able to work with other companies' products. Apple doesn't love doing that. An EU spokesperson gave their perspective this week to reporters.

Archival audio: The decision not to roll out Siri AI in the U is Apple's and Apple's only because absolutely nothing in the DMA prohibits Apple from introducing new products in the EU. What Apple is however not allowed to do just like any other gatekeeper is to close the market. It is not for them to decide who gets to innovate in Europe and it's not for them to choose which AI tools our EU citizens get to use or not.

Zoë Schiffer: I have one thing to say, which is I think Europe needs to write better regulations. I have talked to many people who do legitimately feel like these are prohibitive to innovation and honestly just very confusing.

Brian Barrett: Yeah. It says a lot that Apple is just like, "You know what? Fine. We're out. "That's a pretty high bar and—

Zoë Schiffer: You can have an inferior product. Moving on to the tech reporting Super Bowl, which is on Friday, SpaceX is officially going public.

Brian Barrett: Congratulations to all the newly minted billionaires.

Zoë Schiffer: Thank you. Just kidding. We're not among them, but many people are and we will get into that. It is slated to become the largest IPO in history. It set its price at $135 a share, which would value the company at roughly $1.7 trillion.

Brian Barrett: That is trillion with a T and an R.

Zoë Schiffer: So a lot of companies go public every single year, but SpaceX's debut marks the entrance of AI companies hitting the public markets. Anthropic is slated to go public as is OpenAI. They've both confidentially filed their S1s and then announced those confidential filings very, very publicly. And so this is the first of a series of AI firms going public in a way that's going to really change the industry and also potentially the economy.

Brian Barrett: It is a moment that we're going to look back on as being, oh, this is the moment that launched these AI companies into the stratosphere in SpaceX's case, literally. Or this was the very height of the bubble that we've all been waiting to burst. And I don't know, Zoë, which is it? I honestly, it still feels like ... I'm not trying to hedge too much. It does genuinely feel like it could go either way.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I mean, it could go a lot of different ways. We don't know how the IPO is going to be received. So far, demand seems really, really strong. Obviously if the IPO unexpectedly flops, it could be pretty bad for the entire market. It does seem like it is going to benefit Elon Musk quite a lot. It's already the world's richest man net worth around 700 billion, but he stands to earn quite a lot more due to his 42 percent stake in the company and he could become the world's first trillionaire, we're saying that word quite a lot, if the IP goes well. One other thing that I thought was really interesting is that SpaceX reserved an unusually high amount of the stock for retail investors, 30 percent. I thought this was interesting for a couple of reasons, one of which was just that Tesla is one of the most widely held retail stocks on Robinhood and platforms like that. And I think that it has allowed Elon Musk to keep the company ... The company does pretty well regardless of whether the kind of underlying business fundamentals are going exceptionally well because he has this very loyal fan base that is keeping the stock price really, really high. And so even when there's business issues, Tesla continues to, at least in the United States, perform.

Brian Barrett: I think it's signaling from the jump, “Hey, we're very open to being a meme stock also. We'll be a real stock, but we'll also be a meme stock. So come on in.” And it is sort of like building on this sort of cult of personality and trading on that, which I think it increasingly is going to have to, and we've talked about this before, but I'll keep talking about it forever, that SpaceX was such a interesting company with good fundamentals and a real business model behind it and promising revenue growth. And then it absorbed xAI and became a much less stable company.

Zoë Schiffer: I know. I actually think that this is such an interesting part of assessing Elon Musk as a business person because obviously as someone who reported on his Twitter takeover now X for quite a while, it was so easy to look at that company and be like, advertising is way down. This company's entirely dependent on advertising. He has made very obvious mess-ups in terms of the business. The business did not appear to be going well, but you can't really assess Elon Musk as the owner of a single company because he actually has an empire. So X isn't going well, merge it with XAI. Those companies are spending a lot of money and not making as much. Well, then SpaceX will buy them and suddenly you're looking at a very different company.

Brian Barrett: And even on a more granular level than that, you can't sell any Cybertrucks. OK, SpaceX will buy Cybertrucks.

Zoë Schiffer: Right.

Brian Barrett: It is this sort of, I would say a shell game, but a shell game involves hiding the ball. It's all out in the open. He's just doing it, but it's this really circular. And I'd say too, in terms of that sort of circular logic of everything being interconnected within his own companies, he has now made SpaceX a nexus for other AI companies as well by selling compute.

Zoë Schiffer: Right.

Brian Barrett: Now we're looking at a point where if SpaceX goes down at some point, it's going to hit Anthropic and Google and other people who have bought into spending billions of dollars on compute through its Colossus data center as well. So it's a fascinating tapestry, Zoë, that he's woven. How about that?

Zoë Schiffer: It is a fascinating tapestry. But at the top, we kind of mentioned that a lot of people could end up owning a little slice of SpaceX stock, whether or not they want to. And that is because the NASDAQ-100 recently relaxed its rules to make it easier and faster for SpaceX to be included, which forces funds that track the index to invest in SpaceX practically overnight. So this is now kind of integrated in vast parts of the economy that people might not even necessarily know about.

Brian Barrett: Yeah. It's going to be in your 401k—

Zoë Schiffer: Right.

Brian Barrett: —if you have a 401k, all these places they can't really control. I hope that there's not a big bubble burst systemic failure because if there is, again, it would take down Nvidia, which is already such a huge portion of the stock market, Google. Basically the systemic risks are already there, whether you're in SpaceX or not. Before we go to break, there's one more story that's been unfolding this past week that we'd like to talk about and it directly involves WIRED in a good way. Last week, WIRED reporters, Dhruv Mehrotra and Dell Cameron reported that Meta quietly embedded an unreleased facial recognition system into the Meta AI app, which is installed in over 50 million devices and is what you used to control Meta Ray-Ban and other smart glasses with Meta AI. They never publicly activated it, but they also never disclosed it. Dhruv and DEll found it by looking at the code in the app. We called Meta AI and that's when they confirmed that this code had been discreetly added over multiple updates this year. We'll get into more details about how it works, but here's the thing, one day after we published this piece, Meta deleted nearly all the code from the app.

Zoë Schiffer: Impact journalism.

Brian Barrett: They won't say why. They won't say whether it'll come back, but that is impact journalism. So great job, Dhruv and Dell and everyone else who worked on this story. The system was designed, and again, this is based on going through the code that was saving right there in the app, designed to capture faces through Ray-Ban smart glasses, convert them into biometric face prints. Faceprint is a word that I wish we didn't have to use just in general.

Zoë Schiffer: I know. Same.

Brian Barrett: And then match them against a local database on the user's device. So in other words, it would clock people's faces and put them into a database and just let it sit there on device. If it couldn't identify a face, it would just keep it there for future processing, which is to say, keep it in there until if and when you could actually assign a name to it. So really just capturing everyone's faces that you see.

Zoë Schiffer: Oh my God.

Brian Barrett: Publicly, Meta has said this is something that they're thinking through. Meta has acknowledged that face recognition is a thing that they are interested in potentially doing. They said they would first take a very thoughtful approach before they did it. But while they're saying that publicly, the New York Times has reported on internal memos that show that Meta had planned to time the rollout for a quote dynamic political environment, waiting until people would be too distracted with other stuff going on to give meaningful pushback to face recognition in their glasses.

Zoë Schiffer: Apple said, "We care about privacy." Meta said, "How about this?"

Brian Barrett: How about not?

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. How about not? I mean, this is really concerning to me for a few reasons, but the pushback that Meta seemed to give to this article was we haven't enabled the system yet, which seems like both acknowledging the reporting and completely beside the point, you are putting this code on these devices so that you can turn it on at any moment. You can flip a switch and suddenly the glasses have facial recognition in them.

Brian Barrett: Well, and tied to that, the direct response we got from Meta was we had Meta's VP of communications. Andy Stone said at first that the feature does not exist. CTO Andrew Bosworth said that the reporting was quote, absolutely dishonest. And then within 24 to 36 hours of those comments, Meta pushed an update that got rid of all the code. So if the feature didn't exist and if it was absolutely dishonest, why then remove it?

Zoë Schiffer: I think that that language is actually very, very sneaky. I think saying the feature doesn't exist is basically trying to get around that the code was there but they haven't designed a fully fleshed out feature to go along with it. You know what I mean?

Brian Barrett: It's sort of like if you have a jack in the box but you haven't wound the arm yet saying the little guy inside does not exist.

Zoë Schiffer: I love your metaphors.

Brian Barrett: Because no one has—thank you so much. They are strained. They are convoluted. Yeah, yeah. Meta's interest, there's an obvious interest for Meta incorporating a feature like this. I think I've heard some Meta people say, look, this is for accessibility. A lot of people have vision problems or whatever other issues that this could potentially help with. I'll buy that there's a use case there, but I think the issue is you can't really push it just for those people. You know what I mean? You have to sort of push it to everybody. And the thing with face recognition glasses is you can't really opt out, right? You can't opt out of someone capturing your face and storing it on their glasses.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I mean, I will say this about Meta. The world that Meta is creating is just quite simply not the world that I want to live in. I do not think that their products reflect a vision of the future that feels exciting or inspiring to me versus companies where you are not fundamentally the product. They are in fact selling you a physical product or trying to enhance your real life in some way, which to me just feel much more aligned with my values frankly.

Brian Barrett: Yeah. Although you do love AI alop.

Zoë Schiffer: I do. I do. That's an exception. And that is purely for entertainment and I'm not proud of that fact. Coming up after the break, we're going all the way to New York to hear about an investigation into Madison Square Garden’s surveillance machine and the man behind it all, James Dolan.

Brian Barrett: So chances are if you're based in the US or at all an NBA fan, you've been following or at the very least aware of the NBA final series between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs. Championships have been gathering a lot of attention lately as the Knicks celebrate their first championship appearance in 27 years. Massive crowds of New Yorkers around the city have been gathering outdoors to watch the game and have packed the next home arena, Madison Square Garden. The garden has long been an iconic venue for concerts and events, but believe it or not, it's also one of the most aggressive corporate surveillance operations in the country. Earlier this year, WIRED contributing editor Noah Shachtman and reporter Robert Silverman published an investigation into how MSG owner and Knick's owner, Jim Dolan, has built an intricate system that surveils fans who attend the venue from using facial recognition cameras that process 40 people per minute to compiling dossiers on transgender Knicks fan. The track record of this surveillance under Dolan's leadership is astonishing. We've got Noah Shachtman here to talk about it. Noah, thank you so much for coming on.

Noah Shachtman: Sure thing.

Brian Barrett: This investigation from you and Robert Silverman, it was a long time in the making. Do you want to go back to what first tipped you off when you first became aware that MSG was this panopticon this whole time?

Noah Shachtman: Right. So there have been reports leaking out since 2018 that Madison Square Garden was using facial recognition technology of one sort or another in their venues. And I should add that the MSG company both includes Madison Square Garden, the iconic Radio City Music Hall, the Beacon Theater, and more recently the Sphere in Las Vegas. Anyway, report's been going on for several years, but what really started to break things open was a lawsuit in September of 2025 by a former Madison Square Garden security staffer who basically sued his bosses. And so we used that opportunity to go start digging and take a look and we found some remarkable stuff.

Brian Barrett: I want to get into that lawsuit and I want to get into what you found when you started digging, but I want to step back first. For folks who are not as familiar with MSG and more specifically with Jim Dolan, who is a real character and I don't mean that in a colorful, fun kind of way. This guy's a big personality, has a long sort of contentious track record. Could you catch us up on Jim Dolan and how his personality and what we know about him feeds into what he's done here?

Noah Shachtman: Right. Well, I think just the shorthand is that Jim Dolan is a incredibly wealthy, incredibly powerful media and sports executive. The key thing if you've just got to shorthand him is he has a band called JD & the Straight Shot and their most famous tune is about his former friend Harvey Weinstein and it's called “I Should’ve Known.”

Brian Barrett: What a shorthand.

Noah Shachtman: It's incredible.

Brian Barrett: God help us if we can be described in one sentence that way. But yeah, and this is the guy. And he's also incredibly wealthy. Buddies with Donald Trump, as we saw at the recent game 3 in the series, Donald—he was sitting right next to Trump.

Noah Shachtman: Yeah, he got married at Mar-a-Lago. He's known him forever.

Brian Barrett: So Dolan is, I think you described him so well, has built this sort of surveillance dragnet. What has he used it for? What is it made up of and how does he apply it? What's the upshot here?

Noah Shachtman: I'll talk about the current iteration of it because it's evolved over time. So the current iteration of it is that around Madison Square Garden to get into the venue, you have to pass by these kind of new jack metal detectors. It's by a company called Xtract One—that's “extract” with an “X.” Those have a series of cameras attached to them. Those cameras are running facial recognition algorithms. And if there's a hit that's fed into a larger video management system that can either alert security right away or track the person throughout anywhere they go in the garden. Who does he use this on? Well, Dolan would say it's to stop terrorists and to stop criminals or whatever, but there's very little evidence of that, very little. And in fact, what we heard from the NYPD is that they don't supply any facial recognition or any other kind of data to Madison Square Garden for those purposes. So who does he use it for instead? Who does he use this facial recognition for instead? Instead, it's to track a series of people on lists. Most famously on those lists are lawyers, lawyers who have sued the garden in any way, shape or form. Famously, there's a case of a lawyer who was taking her kid to see, I think the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall. And just because someone else in her firm had sued Madison Square Garden, she was not allowed to bring her kid to Radio City.

Brian Barrett: So it's not even precision targeting, right? It's sort of guilt by association and a ban for life based on whatever criteria Jim Dolan decides on.

Noah Shachtman: Yeah. And then there's accidents too. So for example, in our investigation, we found screenshots of a little girl, she couldn't have been more than, I don't know, eight years old who got flagged by the facial recognition system. Now it's an accident, of course, but the fact that she got logged in at all is a real problem.

Brian Barrett: This gets us into the lawsuit. Do you mind sort of setting us up with who filed this suit? Why? What's the current status of it? Just to give us a little sense of, because I find it so interesting it is from someone who was inside the system.

Noah Shachtman: Right. So the lawsuit was filed by a guy named Donnie Ingrasselino, who's a former New Jersey law enforcement professional who then went on to work for the Tao Group, which was a series of nightclubs and restaurants that was partially owned at the time by Jim Dolan, although he later divested it. And then he went on to work for Madison Square Garden proper. Now this lawsuit has all kinds of stuff in it, but it also has a couple of really shocking claims, including the surveillance of a trans woman whose only crimes seemed to be that she'd gotten too close to players and to Madison Square Garden staffers. And so we went looking to try to track down that claim and others that are in the lawsuit.

Brian Barrett: Can we talk more about that? You referenced Nina Richards, who's the trans Kicks fan who was tracked. What was so striking to me was the detail in which Nina Richards was tracked and the dossier that they put together. Do you mind talking a little bit about that? Just because it feels very, both In terms of I guess the speciousness of how they're deciding who they're tracking and also the level at which I think it goes beyond when you think of facial recognition, you think, "Well, OK, I do that at the airport." It's way beyond that and I think it's a very instructive case.

Noah Shachtman: Yeah, me too. I mean, honestly, I gasped when I got ahold of this secret internal Madison Square Garden report, 18 pages that detailed literally second by second Nina Richard's movements within the garden on a single day. So think about that. 18 pages, second by second, single day. And so what did it track? It tracked when she got in, it tracked which elevator she got into. It tracked when she bought a beverage. It tracked when she said hello to a Madison Square Garden employee. It tracked when she sat down. It tracked when she got up to go to the bathroom. It tracked her going into the bathroom. It tracked her coming out of the bathroom on and on and on. I was a incredibly disturbing dystopian enemy of the state style dossier on this one person, one trans woman on Pride Night, I should add, over the course of a few hours. It was really shocking.

Brian Barrett: Noah, you are a celebrated, venerated national security journalist. You are. You have covered national security for a long time and you have covered, for lack of a better word, real spy stuff. You've been deep in it. How does that compare to this in terms of source handling in terms of the process here? Because it really rhymes, right?

Noah Shachtman: Beyond. So look, for WIRED back in the day, I went to Iraq a couple of times. I went to Afghanistan. For WIRED, I reported on all the intelligence agencies. And I've never had a situation like this where people were so scared and took such elaborate steps to avoid being outed as a source. In spy movies, there's this thing called a brush pass where someone pretends to bump into you or pretends to give you a hug or whatever and slip some information in your pocket. As far as I know, that shit has never happened in real life, or at least not to me. It finally happened in real life during the story.

Brian Barrett: Wow.

Noah Shachtman: You would have people that I'd reach out to, they'd be like, "Sorry, wrong number." And then I'd hear back from them on a different number two seconds later. We had an incredibly cold winter here in New York, the coldest in decades. And yet here I am outside freezing my ass off with a source because the source will not meet inside for fear of being bugged. And you think, well, wow, these people must be just paranoid. They've seen too many spy movies themselves. Well, not exactly. Famously, and we kind of captured this in our story, is two Knicks legends met up one night in the garden, one of whom was Charles Oakley, who was a famous critic of Jim Dolan. And he was told by his former teammate, Patrick Ewing, one of the greatest Knicks of all time, to pipe down because there were listening devices everywhere. So these people acted more paranoid than spies, but they had some reason to act this way.

Brian Barrett: Tell me more about the Charles Oakley of it all, because that was a really fascinating part of this story, I thought, because here's a guy you would think he's a Knicks icon of fan favorite. You would think he would be untouchable just because of his association with the franchise. He's not apparently. Do you mind talking through his experience a little bit more and what you got from talking to Oak?

Noah Shachtman: If you're looking at the finals right now, you see during the broadcast that there are all these Knicks legends there, guys like Luke Charles Brewell, Patrick Ewing, Alan House, and John Starks, what have you. Who you don't see there—the one person you don't see—it's really shocking not to see him there, is Charles Oakley, who was kind of the Knicks brawniest enforcer during the '90s, a great player. Why is he not there? He's not there because for years he was openly critical of Jim Dolan's management of stewardship of the team. And then in the mid 2010s, he got into an altercation. I mean, there's lots of different ways to spin it, but he got into an altercation with MSG security and was thrown out of the garden and he was banned from there on in. And there's been a series of accusations back and forth. There's still all sorts of lawsuits going on, but yeah, he's sort of the one guy that's been ostracized and we've talked to some sources within the Madison Square Garden security community. Let's say there was orders put out to follow him to surveil him. So this is not just a typical situation of a franchise not getting along with a particular player. There's been a long ugly legal battle. There's been accusations of surveillance both digitally audio and physical tailing with the guy.

Brian Barrett: I feel like people listening to this and anyone who's read your story and I right now are probably thinking, how can they do this? How is it possible that this is legal? And we say a lot of these are allegations, but your reporting has stood a lot of them up.

Noah Shachtman: Yes.

Brian Barrett: But what is the accountability? Is there any sort of measure that can say, "Hey, actually Jim Toll and MSG, knock it off." Where should the line be legally? I know we all have our personal opinions and what can be done if they're over it.

Noah Shachtman: Right. So there have been some attempts to reign this in. Oddly, one of them came from New York's state liquor authority because they were like, "Hey, hold on a second. You're discriminating against customers by putting them on this dystopian band list." So they sent an investigator, a former cop to start asking around. Madison Square Garden then put another hired private investigators to tail the private investigator who was investigating the garden.

Brian Barrett: Oh God.

Noah Shachtman: Anyway, point being is when that happened, Jim Dolan also got on TV in New York, posted the head of the state liquor authority's phone number and email and told Knicks fans to tell him to go "stick to his knitting." So that was to mix sports metaphors, that was a real brushback pitch and there hasn't been as much activity afterwards. There has been a lot of talk in local political circles, however, about whether James Dolan deserves some of the special treatment he gets from New York City and he does get special treatment. Madison Square Garden doesn't pay property taxes and it's a benefit that's over the years has been estimated to be worth over a billion dollars. Should he continue to get that? There's been a lot of questions about that. Since our story has come out, the mayor, Zohran Mamdani, the Attorney General Tish James have said they're going to look into this further. We'll see if that goes anywhere.

Brian Barrett: Noah, you're a Knicks fan.

Noah Shachtman: I'm a Knicks Sicko. It's like—

Brian Barrett: You're a Knicks Sicko.

Noah Shachtman: Yeah. Look, I mean, this current run of success regardless, usually being a Knicks fan is more like an addiction than an enjoyable experience.

Brian Barrett: I'm an Orioles fan, so it's not quite the same, but I am familiar with long stretches of losing. They have taken the series to New York. They're playing an MSG. You've been watching, I assume, every second and every minute and every replay. What do you feel when you watch the game and you're seeing everybody court side enjoying the game knowing that they're behind the scenes? There are dossiers being put together probably. There are cameras tracking people. There are people who maybe weren't allowed in potentially. How's that feel?

Noah Shachtman: I've thought a lot about this and I think that if you're to be a sports fan and really to be a fan of almost any entertainment in 2026 means separating out the ownership from the product you're seeing or from the artists that are creating it. And I think, look, more broadly light, we're in this age of media consolidation, billionaire power controlling what we watch and the kind of music we listen to. And you can hate the Paramount Warner merger and still want to see the next HBO show and enjoy it. And so I think you do have to kind of divorce how you feel about ownership with how you feel about the product.

Brian Barrett: Noah, thank you so much for being here. Everyone, please go read Noah and Robert Silverman's story. It is great. It is more relevant now than even when it came out with the playoffs and, uh, Knicks in five.

Noah Shachtman: God willing.

Zoë Schiffer: That's our show for today. We'll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. Uncanny Valley is produced by Kaleidoscope Content. Adriana Tapia produced this episode. It was mixed by Amar Lal at Macro Sound. Pran Bandi is our New York studio engineer. Mark Leyda is our San Francisco studio engineer. Kimberly Chua is our senior digital production manager. Kate Osborn is our executive producer and Katie Drummond is WIRED's global editorial director.