Patti Harrison Grew Up With Tech As Her North Star. Not Anymore

0:00I recently chatted with McKinsey's Dan Swan about how businesses successfully transitioned to AI, the coming agentic wave, and even the sad loss of tennis line judges. Here's a sneak peek. Some people are buying software and calling it a transformation. The people that are really getting the most value from it are fundamentally doing something very different, which is they're taking that technology and they're incorporating it with changing the capabilities of their people, fundamentally redesigning their processes and tracking the impact through the bottom line. There's much more in the full interview with Dan Swan, which can be found in its entirety on wired.com. Also, check out McKinsey's playbook, ReWired, available at your favorite bookseller. From Wired, this is the Big Interview. I'm Katie Drummond, Wired's Global Editorial Director. My guest today is the Sensational Comedy Writer and Performer, Patty Harrison.

1:00You may know her from her scene stealing work on Tim Robinson's, I think you should leave. I sued the city because I was accidentally soared into the pants of the Big Charlie Brown at the Thanksgiving Day Parade. I made all my money off the Big Charlie Brown, so don't even come and try and tell me any crap. I don't want that. Sorry, sorry, I will get it together, but if you have not seen Patty on that show, it's very, very funny. You may also know Patty as Ruthie on Hulu's shrill, or from her various appearances on the Tonight Show in Jimmy Kimmel, but what you probably don't know, which I didn't know until recently, is that Patty Harrison is a wired subscriber. Good for us, good for her. This month, we are putting out a concept issue of Wired called Wired Women. And when we decided on that for September, we obviously knew we needed a woman to put on the cover. Patty immediately came to mind. She's hilarious, a great actor, and I can't stress enough how much she nailed the assignment.

2:01So much so that in the end, we didn't just put her on one cover, we put her on four of them. I'm a little bit biased, but if you have not seen these covers, I highly suggest you check them out. They're incredible. And I am here talking to Patty remotely today. She's been in London for a sold out run of her new one woman show called Just Ironing Some Things Out, which by the time you hear this interview, she'll have also performed at Edinburgh's Fringe Fest. Welcome, Patty. Hey, thank you. You are so funny, and you are often very, and I mean this is a compliment, just like conventionally funny. You've talked before about feeling that sort of pressure to incorporate politics into your work and how you don't necessarily want to, right? And it doesn't necessarily have to be about being a trans woman. Maybe it's about organizing for democratic socialism. Maybe it's about the genocide in Gaza. Just because those things are part of you or part of what you value or important to you, it doesn't mean that your comedy has to be about those things.

3:05You've also talked though about how those things can't really be separated. How do you think about drawing that line or knowing where that line is? Yeah, I think there's a balance. Finally, when I started doing comedy in New York, I was working at a restaurant and I was not that long out of coming out as transgender and it was my first time living alone in the city and I was dealing with a lot of agoraphobia essentially and just like had a really hard time commuting and being out in public and adjusting to society, trying to like have a sense of normal seed, trying not to feel afraid, sort of entering or exiting any room that I'm going into. And I think when I was working at this restaurant and dealing with that stuff, I started doing comedy bits that were about anything but that because I think doing comedy at that time

4:09for me was an escape and it was a place for me to just explore any other sort of ideas outside of my daily strife and sort of my identity prison of that society has kind of like pushed upon me. And I don't think that's exclusive to transgender people. I think a lot of people are like that. But I think I think I felt a bit resentful after the first kind of big moment comedic for my comedy career was a bit that I did on the tonight show that I was brought on to do by two of my very good friends, Joe Firestone and Mike Desenzo who are brilliant comedy writers. They're both cis for the record, for the fucking record. Am I allowed to cut cis men? You cut all you want. Well, Joe is actually female. cis men and women. But she's taking that male

5:14ass name back. Watch out. Sorry, Joe, the Joe community. But they brought me on to address the Trump military ban that was happening at that time where he was banning trans people in the military, et cetera, et cetera. I think after that moment a lot of the opportunities that I was approached for was to speak on politics and be sort of like a representative in a way for transgender people, that said, I have never felt that I was the right person to kind of be speaking explicitly about those things. But I think when you live an intrinsically politicized life, your life experiences is political. Everyone's life experiences political. Like I don't think

6:20people can separate morals from politics. It's the same thing. And I think comedy is sat in your understanding of the truth of the world and how you either speak on that or you subvert that. And so even by making the choice to make a bunch of comedy that's about anything other than what's happening in the world in and of itself is political because it's a reaction to wanting to escape from a reality that is like giving you existential dread. It's a choice. It's a choice. I mean, there is so much right now that just isn't funny. How do you gesture to those sort of more horrific realities of the news when there's no punchline? I think a large part of that is to do with the fact that we have conflated our news intake with social media, which I think is horrific.

7:21Like I think those two should be separate. I remember when Twitter was like comedy. It was just people tweeting. And then when they integrated the like the news, like ticker or whatever, like being a part of it, I think it created this really toxic sort of dynamic of incentivizing people to have really inflammatory political takes to get shares or retweets or whatever to get shares. Graham all centered the chat. But yeah, I think like people want to be shocking in their humor. And I think I'm one of those people. Like I've always been drawn to shock humor. And I think it's just because of like the way I was brought up and the way that my childhood played out. And you can read all about that in my book that I'm also pushing today. That is

8:27sponsored by DARPA, which is so awesome that they gave me the money to self-publish this book. I guess it's not self-publish if DARPA's publishing it. There's a lot of amazing work. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, which I actually used to cover as a reporter. I didn't know that you were deeply connected to DARPA. Yeah, and APAC. I take money from both, but I use it for fun creative ways. It's a cool idea. They were publishing books over there. It's a residency. Yeah, I just have, I'm allowed to write about sort of my transgender journey finding my womanhood and also why we need to keep investing in robotics that are able to scan faces instantly that are able to fly at 80 miles an hour. I take a 90 degree turn instantly. Kind of why they need to be able to carry like a human amount of weight, why they need to be able to grab someone like from under a bed, why they have to have that sort of like prehensile grip. Why those things are necessary and also like my first time wearing makeup.

9:31And autonomous killing. Yeah, well, I don't want to say too much. Don't spoil it. Sorry. Okay, don't spoil it. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. I recently chatted with McKinsey's Dan Swan about how business is successfully transitioned to AI, the coming agentic wave and even the sad loss of tennis line judges. Here's a sneak peek. Some people are buying software and calling it a transformation. The people that are really getting the most value from it are fundamentally doing something very different, which is they're taking that technology and they're incorporating it with changing the capabilities of their people, fundamentally redesigning their processes and tracking the impact through the bottom line. There's much more in the full interview with Dan Swan, which can be found in its entirety on wired.com. Also, check out McKinsey's playbook, ReWired, available at your favorite bookseller. I am curious. You've talked a little bit so far about social media, about

10:39Instagram. What is your relationship to social media now? You were kicked off Twitter early and it's downswing, if I may call it that. I think 2021, you impersonated Nila Wafers. Is that how you pronounce the name of that cookie company? Yeah. Okay. So you impersonated the Nila Wafers. I'm so sorry. I don't know where those cookies are from. I'm Canadian. They maybe weren't a thing when I was growing up. I checked. Donald Trump was unbanned from Twitter. Kanye West was unbanned when Elon Musk bought the company and renamed it X. I went and looked up your account. I believe you are still banned. Yeah. Yeah. I think that social media, as we have it, is hell. I think it is a, it's like truly the most literal penopticon. We were bugs trapped under a little glass and

11:42it's self, it's hard because I think the frustration is that there's multiple frustrations. One is that we all see that this is evil, but I think the other layers of that is we are also conditioned to attack each other individually instead of attacking the systemic issues, the larger problems, which is that they are clinically testing these features to make sure that people become addicted, that, and I think people are embarrassed to admit that they're addicted to Instagram or their phones or they'll say it in a jockey way. But I do think it is, I think it's a systemic thing. I think the, these companies are really in a very, like, standardly evil way. Doing things they know will

12:49affect us in the negative, in the whole, to make money and to keep people trapped in, it's like it's very similar to alcohol and cigarettes. And like, it's in the dumbest way. And I have had a really hard time with that because of just being a comedian and feeling the need for Instagram to promote shows and keep people in the know. And I've been booked, I've gotten jobs on TV shows because of stuff that I, the way I was posting online, jokes I was making online. And that's how I got into, like, acting. And so I do personally have this sense of, like, oh no, if I, if I delete this, this will end my income, this will end. I'll be forgotten or something. And I think it's really

13:52designed to make you feel that way, which is insidious. Yeah, I mean, there's, there's an entire global economy running through these platforms. And that was something I was curious about is to what extent do you feel like Instagram in particular, you just have to be there. I mean, I think I read that Tim Robinson found you on Instagram and thought you were hilarious, right? And so there was sort of this meaningful, professional opportunity that came up as a result of your presence there. And yet you speak so clearly, you really do speak clearly about the ills of these platforms. Yeah, but you work in entertainment, right? So how do you separate yourself from that? And can you? Well, I definitely think in a very short amount of time too, social media has changed significantly. I think the social media that I had when I was in middle school and high school, which was Zanga, and my space. Zanga is like live journal. It's a blogging. It was a blogging site where you could like

14:59you could get like a HTML. If you were good at it, you could make like your background of a picture you pulled from an image search and you can change the colors. You can literally change the colors of the font. Hell yes. Yeah. I loved Zanga. And that was like as a middle schooler, that was a first place I was writing stuff as a joke. Like writing joke posts about my fake day I would have in school where I'm like, oh my god, Mariah Carey came into school today and she was singing and it was so good. The principal like, this is a bad example. Because that actually did happen to me. Did it wait? Did it actually? No. This is recently. She should ask. I am very gullible, which is a really bad trait for a journalist, but I will keep that in mind to manipulate you later in life, but not right now in this moment. Okay. So Mariah Carey was not singing at your school. She was not. Okay. I read or I read. I listened to audiobook. I feel weird saying I read a book if I listened to the

16:01audiobook, but I and I might butcher the title, but I believe it's called 10 arguments for deleting your social and media accounts right now. Okay. I general La Nye. I don't know how to say that. Yes. No. Jaron Lannier. Jaron Lannier. I made him franchise because I don't think. But he wrote this like very short, succinct book that I think came out in like 2018. And he's a really brilliant technologist. I mean, this is someone who has worked in Silicon Valley for a long time. So I think the fact that that book came from him says a lot. I don't know. I don't know. When we edit this, we'll make sure we both sound smart about Jaron. Okay. Jaron Lannier. I listened to this book and I really agreed with a lot of his framing of social media in

17:05like in a subjective way. But also in like the purest sense, which is social, and I believe this, social media at its core is not an evil thing. Social media is a tool for connection. When I was on my space, when I was in high school, and I was in rural Ohio, and was so limited in what I had access to culturally and like completely in the closet, having no language about queerness, like having the internet and having my space was amazing. I found so like so many different bands and alternative music and like alternative people. And I think it really helped me find communities outside of where I lived, where there weren't people who liked the things that I liked. And I wasn't being bludgeoned with 5 million ads at that time.

18:06So yeah, sorry. All right, another quick break. We'll be right back. AI is everywhere in the workplace, but which companies are really making it work? That's the question at the heart of rewired. McKinsey's playbook for winning with technology and AI. When you think about it from a company or a CEO perspective, it's actually not any harder than it is when you've done any transformation in the past, right? You got to go and understand what's the opportunity, how much is it worth, what's the investment required to get there, and is it going to be important for me to transform my business in that regard? But a lot of people don't actually go through that process of understanding what are those two or three areas and then making the hard call. Sometimes it's actually more difficult to say we're not doing four through six and it is to say we are doing one through three. There's much more in the full interview with Dan Swan, which can be found in its entirety on wired.com. Also, check out McKinsey's playbook ReWired, available at your favorite bookseller. When we first talked, when we talked about you doing these covers, I remember

19:18you saying that you grew up looking at sort of wired, but at the technology industry more broadly and thinking like this is amazing and these people are doing amazing things and are going to like save the world and change things for the better and that you have obviously over the years and decades, not to age you too much, over the years become very much disillusioned with that notion and disappointed and angry. I think that so many people share that view. I mean, certainly at wired, that is a view that we share and that's sort of how the publication has changed in recent years. I guess I'm just curious about your evolution through that. Can you talk a little bit more about that sort of what your interest was in technology when you were younger and how it's changed? I just as a kid, I was obsessed with sci-fi and fantasy and was really excited about this future

20:20where there would be artificial intelligence and there would be self-driving cars and there would be robot animals walking amongst us. How cool would that be? But then there's the dissolution meant that comes with realizing that capitalism will sour everything once it like capitalism reveals grifters. These companies when they're developing these robotics that have the potential to really hurt people, they profess that they promise these aren't going to be used in combat. This is just for the sake of like progress in society and like we see them using these robotics, this tech, this AI tech, these robot dogs in Gaza. We see them experimenting with this tech like in combat situations, combat I feel is a generous way to put it like considering it is a full on genocide.

21:28And I can't, I don't have a way to reconcile that at this point because it does, it makes you lose faith in this community that I have always seen to be as intrinsically progressive because like robotics is, is futurism, it's science, it's progressive by nature. And I feel like we used to have good social media. We used to have social media without ads, without algorithms. We saw things chronologically. Things that like in moderation are good for your brain. You can learn, you can go to a website, you can learn about something that's niche to your interests. You can go to a cooking website, get a recipe, not be hit with like a bunch of ads for Calche because you want to make a fucking cannellini bean salad. I want to talk to you about AI. Are there things that scare

22:32you about it creatively and artistically? I mean, does it come up in the context of your work? I wonder, I think like what's interesting is I've read on Instagram, the, you can like read an AI summary of your posts. If you like go up and click on it and AI will summarize sort of like what is happening in like a paragraph. And it is so scarily accurate to like being able to recognize like irony and like nuances in humor and little details and photos that I've posted that are there through this real, through in my opinion, I'm like there is a lot of irony or there's like sarcasm or there's different textures, but there's like levels of earnestness. I think in terms of my work, I think it's if I if I'm online, it's inevitable that it will absorb it. I have had the

23:35most fun in my career doing live shows and being in a room with an audience and that's a lot of the shows that I do. I don't record them into a special and I do them for like a year and then I move on to the next show and I like start to rebuild again and that show doesn't live on video. I don't have a lot of clips out. Is that intentional? I don't feel like without a context that my jokes really work in like a one minute clip. I think a lot of what I like to do is build tension over like an hour. So like there's things that wouldn't be funny by themselves that are funny because the of the like atmosphere that's been built over the past 45 minutes. And but I do think that as long as people will come and be in a space and gather to see something like real and feel the energy in the room that there is a certain level of safety to that. Unless we have like AI hologram

24:35comedians that people come to see which I'm sure has been already been like on the table like come see George Kyrlin's AI like come talk to George Kyrlin's hologram. Yeah. I'm curious about your comedy in all of this in the context of of AI Sloth and what's happened to the internet and the this blurry line between what's true and what's not true. Have you felt like you've needed to change your approach to comedy because people have such a hard time telling what's true and what's not true. Does that stress you out in the context of the way you approach your comedy? I think it's interesting. It makes me sad for people. It makes me sad that I I think people are victims having reactions to the stress that has been intentionally cause upon them to keep them engaged on whatever they're looking at. I posted the other day

25:43from our shoot I had like a mega hat. Oh it's like dark mega hat. I was so excited when I was and I posted a picture it's like a thirst trap. It's like me and my bra all my tits are out and I have this hat on but I was joking in the caption. I put like it's like a carry underwood song about Jesus and I was like saying that I was I'm finally glad to be coming out and like getting away from a community that is so judgmental meaning like queer people and that I'm like at liberals and I'm like coming out as Maggar or something as a joke and I thought that was very clear but like because of algorithms it's interesting like pre algorithms I felt like my social media was a my page was a place where people who were following me were there because they sought me out or they saw something I did and they understood it and they liked my work. And so it was more it was more facilitated and if I posted something I could post stuff within the context of them understanding

26:47my point of view about it and like getting it and knowing it's a joke and I think with algorithms kind of taking over you get so much more random harassment because your stuff your posts are completely taken out of context and thrown into other people's feeds and thrown into like people who it's designed to agitate them like the algorithms know this person is not going to like this and they're very likely to post about it this image and so then what that turns into is like I'm getting harassment for a joke that I made which I thought the people who followed me would get and I knew completely that it was edge lority and that I was shit posting and rage baiting and so I'm not saying like oh I'm a victim or anything like I just thought the responses because people were responding really angrily who were progressive like people were like how could you how could

27:52you be trans and post something like this and like you really think that community is going to save you unfollowing or something and I was like so these are people who maybe because of the algorithm they might have followed me for one thing and they don't see my posts really because of you know it just gets buried because I don't post a lot I don't I think keep up in the way that it wants you to incentivize it but like I just thought it was really interesting that these people's cortisol levels are spiked when they see this image that they didn't want to see and I'm like if you took the time you took to type the comment and post it and then unfollow me and instead you just like looked at my page or like a quick scroll or like like searched me and like read like a smidge of my Wikipedia you would see that I'm like trans or that I'm progressive and that I'm like you know I joke around a lot ironically and it's it's definitely changed the the model to which

28:55a lot of comedians I think play their jokes online and I think online culture can have an effect in the real world and the way humor is I think it's really absurd the idea that in order for a joke to be okay it has to exist in a vacuum without context we talk about this at wired a fair bit it's like impossible to have fun on the internet anymore because someone is always so mad at you like someone is always so mad at wired for the smallest little thing for for a joke or something we think is clever or trying to be provocative and we get in a lot of trouble online I mean there's just there's this humorlessness to so much of it that is really a bummer at least in my experience yeah and I I've had so many posts of mine taken down because like for old posts like when they started using AI to comb through people's posts I had so many posts flagged that were like this was this post was taken down for

29:58bullying and abuse and it was a post where I'm talking I like I'm at my friends comedy show who did like an hour and I'm like this bitch just like tore it up like this bitch just had an amazing show but because I called her a bitch there it was saying that I was like bullying her and then when I tried to repeal it it wouldn't take it it wouldn't like reinstate the post and then it was like if you keep doing this your account will be suspended and I was like so where where's the line of free speech that people are commenting like in my in my Instagram calling me a man like implying that I should kill myself and I'm reporting these comments and then I get the message back that's like these comments did not actually go against community guidelines so it's like so what is the line what is the ever moving line for freedom of speech in this context and like I just don't think we should be there anymore like no matter what side of the political spectrum you're on like it is

31:00it is completely destroying your nervous system and your sense of security about you like it makes you see people in such a like bad faith POV like I'm I'm not omitted from that there's been times where I've like oriented online and I'm like about something I saw and I'm like why am I it's like about some actor on a movie being rude to a PA and I'm like why am I right now writing this long about this thing and I'm like maybe I should sit this one out and I think it is just like the I'm like addicted to my phone so I'm speaking from that bias but I it's it's weird the cognitive dissonance of if you like step away from your phone and see all the things that have been normalized so quickly and all the behaviors and how you carry that out into the world there's a lot of progressives who like knew that didn't have to get to that point yeah to uh to know that those

32:03things were bad and we shouldn't be like promoting them but there are people who like their mind has changed once they're touched by something or they are more open to conversation then we write them off as if we're like viewing them as a one kind one shade of person because of what we see on social media and I think it's designed that way I think it's designed to keep us all like separated it's that like trademark fascist sort of divide and conquer uh and I I am feeling so hopeful about this rise in like class consciousness this like peaking interest in socialism like it's so exciting that is like the one I'm like so well that's a great place to end holding onto it I want to ask you are our wired woman you're on these four covers I can't wait to see how people react to them I'm sure I'm sure the reaction will be interesting but yeah pay it forward for us is there a woman out there who inspires you who is who is patty Harrison's wired woman

33:06no I'm going to slam the door behind me and then I'm gonna build another uh pain on the glass ceiling just make it a lot thicker there we go patty thank you thank you for being here and thank you thank you for doing our covers yeah of course when do I get paid let's talk about that after okay it's four million dollars the way the big interview is produced by Lena MaciCis our executive producer is Kate Osborne this episode was mixed by James Yoast our theme music is by Pran Bandi it was fact checked by Matt Giles and I am of course your host Katie Drummond Wired's Global Editorial Director check back here on Thursday for the latest episode of Uncanny Valley where Wired's writers and editors add you to their slack channel

34:07I recently chatted with McKinsey's Dan Swan about how businesses successfully transitioned to AI the coming agentic wave and even the sad loss of tennis line judges here's a sneak peek some people are buying software and calling it a transformation the people that are really getting the most value from it are fundamentally doing something very different which is they're taking that technology in their incorporating it with changing the capabilities of their people fundamentally redesigning their processes and tracking the impact through the bottom line there's much more in the full interview with Dan Swan which can be found in its entirety on Wired.com also check out McKinsey's playbook rewired available at your favorite bookseller