The New Mainstream Media

I'm Ann Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, "Don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals?" Well, maybe they are afraid, and maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win. Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats. We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual. Reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of autocracy in America available now. There are so many human beings in so many historical situations. Some of them so much more terrible and dangerous than anything we face. Soldiers and seemingly lost causes and metaphorical soldiers and metaphorically seeming lost causes. Who just kept going with one thought, "I'm not going to let the bastards win." And sometimes that's all you need. I think that should be the new motto. Get rid of Demosherty Dies and Darkness. The bastard's winning. I emphasize the eye and anyone who's watching. You're the eye. I'm Charlie Wazelle and welcome to Galaxy Brain. And happy new year. Hopefully you've all navigated the Dead Week successfully and had a happy and safe holiday season. And thanks for joining us here as you start your new year. Today's episode is going to be a little bit different. I am joined by my colleague David Frum, who has also joined me in launching a YouTube show and podcast this year. So we talked about a whole bunch of different things, but mostly a lot of inside baseball about what it's like to enter this ecosystem. How platforms like YouTube are constantly pushing creators of all kinds towards more extreme ideas. I tend to blame the algorithm. David and I have a little bit of a debate because he is more on the personal responsibility side of the coin. But it's a good conversation that I think really gets at what it's like to be making media here in 2025, 2026. All the difficulties. But there's one part of the conversation though that's really stuck with me over the past couple of days after we recorded it, which is this idea of first, jettisoning the phrase mainstream media, particularly because as David notes, what we normally talk about and think about as the mainstream media is actually, it's sort of a misnomer now. When you look at the broader media ecosystem and you see the Joe Rogans of the world, the Candace Owens, the, but before he was assassinated, Charlie Kirk, all of these different people, Tucker Carlson, a lot of these folks on the right. But also, podcasters across the ideological spectrum who are independent, there are huge audiences here. These people are really able to command news cycles and they have a lot of power and especially a lot of distribution. What we think of as the mainstream media, the professionalized media is actually in a lot of ways, a little bit on its back foot. There's a lot of distrust of these institutions. There is a lot of, there are a lot of people who simply just don't pay as much attention to them as they used to or there is a backlash against some of them. What David talks about in this conversation that I think is really interesting is the idea that the, you know, formerly, we'll call mainstream media is actually in a position to be more insurgent now. What we think of as the mainstream media should actually put a chip on its shoulder and operate with a little more force and forcefulness and not, you know, trying to come from the, the mushy middle, you know, both sides in 36,000 foot view and instead stand up for what it believes in, stand up for the idea of fact-based journalism and to treat it as a bit of a radical act. That makes me think a little bit about an article I recently read this week in the Washington Post where a publisher, one of one of the guests on our show, I think episode two, gives an interview to the Washington Post about his year in journalism and says that he feels like reporters have forgotten that they have very cool jobs that they are essentially these days like, you know, detectives, right? It's our job to, you know, hunt things down, find new information. And I think that Pablo is really good at coming to journalism in 2025 and now I'm sure 2026 went this chip on his shoulder with a little bit of that, you know, insurgent understanding. Now he's part of, he's an independent journalist, he's not part of that legacy media anymore. But I think that this is something that is going to stick with me in 26. This idea to adopt a little bit of the mantle in a responsible way of people who feel like they're not, you know, tethered to the old traditions to really, I don't know, be a little bit more combative, I think, about trying to tell things truthfully and denouncing, you know, all the, like, the crap that's out there that's trying to mislead people. I think there's a way in which you can get tied up in legacy institutions a little bit. And maybe even just lose sight of the fact that we could be a little bit more pugnacious, a little bit more combative. And that as journalists, our jobs are, our jobs are cool. Our jobs are worth doing with some pride and not apologizing for all that kind of stuff. So that's something that's really going to stick with me with this conversation. But before we get to it, I just wanted to do a little looking forward. It's, as you're listening to this, it's now 2026. And I just wanted to set the table a little bit with not really predictions necessarily, but things that I'm thinking about and looking at for this coming year. And I think the first one is that if 2025 was really a year where politics became even more influence or heavy, even more internet heavy, meme heavy, brain rot heavy, AI slop heavy, I think that that is going to intensify in 2026. I think, you know, as we get move towards the midterms, things are going to heat up. And I think that politics is still really on this trajectory of just being terminally online. The memes, the brain rot. I think back to this YouTube channel that I found this fall that is all AI slop generated videos of the sort of far right mega universe. Elon Musk and Baron Trump and JD Vance and Donald Trump and Melania Trump and all these characters, the AI versions of them singing like opera songs about Charlie Kirk. The famous one of this is called We Are Charlie Kirk. But these videos are inane, right? They're absolutely stupid. They're sort of, it's hard to tell if they are a parody or if they sort of Christian nationalist theme around them is something that's actually being made by people who are trying to push a message. It's sort of post irony. It's so ironic. But they have tens of thousands, in some cases hundreds of thousands and even millions of views. But I think a lot about that kind of content and that brain rot style that has pervaded politics is something that I think we're just going to see further and further intensify and move into the mainstream of culture. And you're going to have a lot of journalists continue, I think, at these legacy institutions, to sort of struggle to put it into context, right? Like how much to take these things of face value versus how much to just think about whether it's just shit posting. And that brings me to the next part, which is this inscrutable rise of political violence. I think that this year we saw quite a bit of that from Charlie Kirk's murder to horrific shooting in Minneapolis. But we have seen a number of incidences in 25 of this memified political violence. This idea that shooters are are really, there is an online culture there, right? That is very meme-heavy, that's very based in community and fandom around shooters and acts of violence. And I think that we're going to continue to see that. But again, we're going to continue to see people, especially the media, really struggle with how to cover this. Because as I've written this past year, a lot of these people know these shooters, know exactly the universe that they're dropping their acts of violence into, right? They know that people are going to search online for breadcrumbs and they can leave all these inscrutable memes and clues and things like that. And that those things will be processed and interpreted by the internet in ways that only add to their fame. So I think if there is something that I think broadly people in journalism who are listening can do is to not necessarily take these things at face value, to understand that this is a now somewhat mature online ecosystem of people who are committing violence for the lulls kind of. And it's, I think it's dangerous. And I think if we start covering that better in the media, I think it actually might have some very small, but important impact on how these things are conducted. Or and whether people try to glorify themselves in this way. So I think we're going to continue to see that even though that's a bit upsetting here. These predictions aren't super uplifting. The next thing though, sort of building on what is going on online is I think we're going to continue to see the decline of text in importance. I think the short form video is still rising, can still rise. And I think that something that is sort of interesting when I say the decline of text, obviously one of the biggest producers of text now is is Generative AI. These tools that people are using to generate a lot of text that is flooding the web with synthetic information, I think that that kind of text is going to increase a lot. And it's going to, it's going to dilute and continue to dilute that. It's going to I think continue in education to sort of degrade the value of actually writing the pros, yourself writing the emails yourself, writing the whatever yourself. And so I think that we're still in a period where this is going to decline. I think I think it could sort of boomerang back, where you could sort of hit the trough there. And then people are going to start to get really sick and tired of chatbot generated text. And that sort of thing. But I think that we are still going to have a year in 26 where we see a lot of anecdotes about kids in schools, reading less, writing less. I think there's going to be a lot of hand-ranging, a lot of it probably very understandable about that. And I think that there's, we're still in this period of digital reversal on that. Where these online tools are causing a, I don't know, I think a bit of a crisis for printed media or text for the time being. Building on that, another thing I'm thinking about right now is, you know, generative AI. And I don't know about, I don't have a good take on the AI bubble, the boom, the bust, what exactly happens this year. I think there's going to be a lot of precarity, a lot of people anxiously watching the market, watching these companies, watching their revenues. And I think even people who don't love artificial intelligence and companies like OpenAI say, I think there's going to be a lot of people watching to make sure that these companies are continuing, like the bottom's not going to fall out of these companies, right? I think a lot of people are going to watch anxiously because if that does happen, you know, that could lead to some market correction and possibly trigger some problems for Wall Street. But I don't know exactly what's going to happen with that. I think you're going to see a lot of investment and data center spend in the same way continue. I think that precarity is going to be there. But where I do see some actual movement is in AI, and politics. I think that the political space is very primed for someone to take the mantle of the tech lash, but in a very like AI-specific way. In a way that I think is both economic and populist in terms of the idea that, you know, some of this financing, you know, maybe unsustainable that, you know, the people who are going to be left holding the bag are going to be, you know, normal folks and retail investors and that, you know, this is all, that these AI companies, these tech companies are playing a very dangerous game and that Washington is sort of, you know, supporting it or standing by. So I think there's an opportunity for someone to come in there, right? Something that I have thought about a lot is if there is a bubble burst in the, you know, the generative AI world in the tech world that leads to trouble in the markets and there is some kind of backstopping from the federal government, from the Trump administration, where they say, you know, this is a national security issue and we, you know, desperately need to make sure that, you know, we continue to compete with China on AI and we're going to do whatever we can to stop these companies, to backstop these companies and keep the flow and bail them out. I think that could trigger a serious populist backlash, a serious backlash on people who feel already like things are rigged and I think there's an opportunity for a politician to come in there and really take them mantle of that or a movement. Another former galaxy brain guest, Max Reed, has a great post on this, on his sub-stack about this idea of platform temperance and in a movement that is sort of rooted a little bit in touching grass but also in finding a framework that's both, that's economic, that's cultural, that's regulatory for approaching technology but not in the way of the late 2010s tech lash which sort of didn't seem to work all that well. And that brings me to the last thing, which is another backlash and I think we're going to see in 2026 a scrolling backlash, that's sort of what I'm calling it is doing a little reporting on this and I think there are a lot of indicators out there right now that people are really tired of their phones and tired of the algorithmic internet and tired of this idea of I am being manipulated all the time, my attention is being directed towards things that I actually don't want to spend my time looking at or my time has not been used in a way that I feel very good about at the end of the day. And I think we are seeing a lot of very small indicators that culturally we're getting fed up with this. I think one of the indicators and we'll see how this plays out over the second semester of the school year but in New York, the phone ban in New York public schools there's some anecdotal reporting that's come out that suggests it's been a very positive thing at least in schools, right? There are a number of from concerts to clubs to bars and restaurants, places that have become no phone zones and there's been a broad anecdotal support for those types of spaces in that they are really helping people shed this device that is making them feel bad, that is keeping them from being as social as they may want to be. And so I think that we're gonna see that increase and continue and I think that there will be a culture that will build around it. There is an article in the substack blog, Blackbird Spyplane, a couple of months ago that has sort of stuck with me that's basically like scrolling on your phone makes you look like a dork. It's just not cool. And I think that that type of cultural signifier that you look like an idiot. This is not an accessory that makes you look cool. I think that that's really coming for our phones and for that head in your device behavior. So that's something that I'm looking into and thinking about a lot as we hit 2026. But that's it, that's what I got for you. Just wanted to say as we enter the new year, thank you so much for joining on this experiment with Galaxy Brain. I'm having a really great time so far, putting out these episodes, I feel like it's helping me use a different part of my brain. And this is something that David and I get into here. But thank you very much for for liking subscribing, commenting, sharing, sending in your nice feedback and also your constructive feedback too. It's been it's been a lot to take in and we got some big things going for for 2026. So onward and upward and here is me, my colleague Dave from. But first a quick break. I'm Ann Applebaum. Over the past year as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals. Well, maybe they are afraid and maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year to make sure their opponents can't win. We could win but we are very very very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual. So the Atlantic is today presenting something a little different. I will interview today, my colleague Charlie Wazelle who has launched his own new podcast on the Atlantic channel Galaxy Brain will be talking back and forth. Since the Galaxy Brain podcast is quite new, I'm going to read a little introduction for those of you who don't know Charlie. He joined the Atlantic in 2021 and became a staff writer in 2022. This year he launched his new podcast Galaxy Brain. Charlie is a graduate of Hamilton College and he's the author of the 2021 book Out of Office unlocking the power and potential of hybrid work. And we're going to talk about some of the experiences, challenges, temptations, of doing a podcast in this day and age, especially for the Atlantic. I'm happy to welcome Charlie. Charlie, congratulations on the new podcast. Thank you. Thank you for having me. This is great. All right. So we're both kind of newbies. I'm like a grizzled veteran with like a three or four month head start ahead of you. So that makes me like, yeah, a front line soldier. But we both, we're both familiar with being guests on podcast, but new to hosting. Yes. And it's very different, right? It is is a whole different, at least I've found it's completely different animal being on the other side. If I had known how hard it was, I would have been nicer to my hosts. Exactly. Exactly. Yes. It's very difficult to construct a conversation and and have it actually, you know, have a flow and end up in the right place and follow the tributaries of, you know, of a of a guest's, you know, meandering mind. It's definitely it's fascinating. Well, so here's this thing. So in order to avoid meandering, here's how I propose to channel the conversation so that we achieve something that's I hope useful and interesting for listeners and viewers. And maybe something we both ourselves will learn from because one of the things we've had to confront as we enter this is unlike old-fashioned book writing or even print text based or even print journalism, where you don't know exactly what your readers want and what they read. You know a lot about the podcast audience, both video and audio. And we also have the contrasting examples of other people in the space who demonstrate what viewers and listeners want and don't want. And one of the things we've had to confront is the tremendous appetite or apparent appetite for extreme content, which flies in the face of what the Atlantic is always trying to provide, which is balance content. How do we make sense of that? How do we respond to that? I mean, I think you get a lot of response to if you do a show on Was Hitler Good, yes, but we're not going to do the Was Hitler Good, yes, show. So but how do you cope with the massive incentives to do a show on Was Hitler Good? Yes. I see this as part of a of a bigger struggle, right? That I that I I write a lot about technology about media media ecology, the ways that social media has worked or changed or transformed society. It's a lot of what the podcast is about. And so there's there's always like a meta element to everything that I am both doing in my actual work and what I am reporting on and and they tend to feed each other, right? So I look at this as I look at podcasting, especially video podcasting and the regular traditional podcasting as in many ways, almost the traditional problems with internet based or digital media on steroids. We are now because of the issues of discovery, because of you know, the advent of everything from generative AI to social networks to you know, declining readership because a lot of the social platforms have have you know, given up on news to some degree, we don't get that same bump from Google, we don't get that same bump from Facebook, etc. It has pushed everything to be so much more algorithmically driven, right? We are really we try to make the best journalistic products that we can, the most responsible ones. But at the end of the day, we are also people who are interested in having that have an impact in the world to reach as many people as possible. And these algorithms are tailored more and more and more to promote the most sensational thing, the thing that outrageous, the thing that shocks the thing that elicits the greatest response and the greatest response of all of those emotional reactions is outrage, is fear, is shock, is anger, right? So I look at what we're doing right now as having to chase this type of viewership, right? We are in this attention economy. We are basically forced to, if we want people to interact with the thing that we have spent all this time laboring over, we have to find a way to frame it, right? We are all, I think a lot of this is like a marketplace, right? And every vendor is out there needing to get people and attract people. And so you're constantly reaching there. And it's difficult because it pushes people to be the worst versions of themselves. And we have to guard against that. We can't succumb to that, like say, just a random person on Twitter or X might. Yeah. Now you're blaming the algorithm a lot here, which is a non-sentient collection of digits. And that's convenient because it has no feelings. Maybe the user, the listener, the reader is a little bit to blame. Well, there's a very interesting issue that I have always seen, right? With, I hate to blame the reader because the reader is also in some sense. The customer and we don't, you know, no one ever got anywhere by disrespecting the customer, at least not in public. But let's pretend we're in private for a minute. Absolutely. I think that this is a problem. People's actual preference and their stated preference is always very different in all consumerism. But especially with the news, you see a lot of people both online and in reader surveys of all kinds at different places where I've worked. And they say that they want to read more about the, you know, the vegetables, right? Like each of your vegetables type stuff. They want to read about climate change more. Anyone who has worked in digital media, in any case, it has access to the metrics. You can see that stories about climate change, very broadly speaking, do not perform as well as stories about say Donald Trump or somebody who is constantly stoking outrage. So there is this real reader preference stated versus actual, right? People are clicking on the outrageous things, the thumbnails with people's eyes that are, you know, bulging out and stuff like that. And not spending time with that really nuanced headline that is actually, quote unquote, you know, boring, but inside is a very nutritional and dense and smart story. Well, this is not a new thing. This has been true as long as there is media. I mean, I remember a passage in Bruce Great Novel, "Remembrance of Things Past," where a character says who has a beautiful library full of the hand to a volume which he never opens. And he thinks, what if every morning they were delivered to my front door in cheap paper, a copy of Pascale's Ponceis. And in that leather-bound edition up there, which I opened once every 10 years, there was a description of the dress worn by the Duchess of So-and-So at the party last night. So media is always sensational. But here's to my mind the difference. Is in 1975, there probably were as many people in the United States who wanted to read or proportionally, as many people who wanted to read or consume Nazi-based content as there were today, or anti-Semitic content as there are today. But either silently or even explicitly, the heads of CBS, ABC, NBC, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Time Newsweek, that was the media. So you know what? They want Nazi content. They want anti-Semitic content. They're not going to get it. We're not going to give it to them. And if we 10 people agree, we're not going to give them Nazi content, then they have to get it from pretty obscure places. But there was always that market. There was money waiting on that. There was a $100 bill lying on the sidewalk and no one picked it up. And we have a more competitive marketplace and somebody picks it up. why I blame the algorithms so fully, right? Because the algorithms are also very powerful in terms of broadcasting and boosting the people who are willing to do that thing, right? That these people don't just come out of nowhere. You know, they like, I think very broadly of the ecosystem that you and I are now a part of, right? Which is YouTube. YouTube's great innovation, greatest success, the thing that has driven it to be a place where, you know, people are like hundreds ingesting hundreds of millions of hours daily of video content is the recommendation algorithm. The up next part of YouTube where on the right side of your page, it feeds you another video after that recommendation algorithm as my reporting and other people's reporting has shown over the years brings people into a little like people call it the rabbit hole, right? Where you watch something let's say it's just a World War Two explanation video, right? A history podcast of World War Two that's not, you know, racist, anti-Semitic at all. But they're talking about Hitler a lot, they're talking about difficult subjects, maybe the Holocaust, something like that. And then you get another video. And that video is maybe just, you know, one tenth of one percent, a little more extreme, right? Or someone who's coming from a little bit more of a far right perspective. Fast forward, you can get people down into this funnel. And that is an algorithmic boost. And that's why I think this is important. I sometimes do go down World War Two rabbit holes. I'm interested in subject like every baby boomer. And I find that with the algorithm as I keep going, the other algorithm serves me is increasingly technical content. So, well, what was the difference between a 16 inch and a 14 inch naval gun in World War Two? Why was the 16 inch gun in fact better? It gets more technical, more specific, more wonky. And I think I'm telling the algorithm, you know, that's what I want. So, you know, there is a kind of thing where we say, "Ah, we're making it a little more hitlery." That yes, that's the algorithm. But that's the algorithm knowing you, you're real self. And it used to be that in like in 1975, CBS would say, "You know what? You want stuff that's a little more hitlery than we're serving, but you're not going to get it." And now the consumer is driving things, isn't he? Or she? I think in World War Two, I think we're safe to say he is. Watching the World War Two videos. So, I agree with that in part. But I think that there are other elements here. I was looking a little bit into, and you know, we talked a bit about discussing this new media ecosystem and the extremism that it can go towards. And I started doing a little more, I've been following her career somewhat closely, but looking a little bit more into Candace Owens and listening to a couple of popular things that she has put out. She's obviously in very extreme voice on the right, very conspiratorial. And there's a great column, O'Ewicio in The New York Times, by Michelle Goldberg about Candace Owens and how she has played into the conspiracy theory that, you know, Charlie Kirk was not killed by the man who was arrested and actually had a summit, a media summit with Charlie Kirk's widow, Erica Kirk. But something that Michelle notices in that piece and I think is very apt is that she, Candace Owens, draws a lot from the true crime genre, which is an extremely popular genre of podcast and media now. And plays a little bit towards the digital sleuths on the internet. So, you know, these are people who are, you know, vigilante investigators, right? They're taking all the information available on the internet, trying to try to follow the lead like they're, you know, a detective pursuing a cold case. And she does a very good job at that, at bringing people along for the hunt, right? Of information and giving them these breadcrumbs and telling them, you know, the story's not right. And I think that that is a part of why people who are looking for that, who are looking for, you know, to play this role of detective or who feel that, you know, we don't have the full story, there's information out there, I can piece it together because I, you know, I have the ability. That is where I think the algorithm can intersect with a creator who is trying to manipulate. And then it can lead you into a path that gets you into a place that's a little more, you know, as you put it, hitlery because I don't think people are necessarily broadly speaking, just saying, yeah, that was good about World War II. I want, I want some Hitler now, right? I think what it, what it is is they believe there's a conspiracy. That explains something that Baffles makes. If I go on the internet, if I'm having trouble getting the little disc battery into my key fob, my car key fob, and I'm flummoxed and the written instructions aren't helpful, and I go online to find a YouTube video of those, how do I get the disc battery into the key fob? If there's someone they're saying, leave it on the doorstep and the leprechaun overnight with a little bit of milk and the leprechaun will come and fix the key fob for you. You know what? I'm skipping that one. That doesn't sound like it's going to work. So why don't people have that response? Like the police, there's a killing. The police have arrested somebody. There is a suspect. It may not be that person, but the idea that there's some global conspiracy of leprechauns who did it instead, that's pretty unlikely as it is they will save my key fob for me. Yes, I take the point about the digital sleuth thing, but at some level people have to have a common sense meter, don't they? But what if instead, it was someone who was making a video who was saying, you're getting screwed by your car company. Your car company, Nichols and Dimes you on all of the things when you take it in for service, they overcharge you. There's this big corporation, they're owned by whatever shadowy people who have their own agendas in whatever who are using your money and they're funding their indulgent lifestyles and who knows what they're doing when they take their private planes, X, Y and Z. And this battery thing is actually a manifestation of this broader thing. There's something bigger about the fact that your battery dies too early on your key fob. And that's the thing because it opens up this world to people where they say, okay, now now I understand like the the unlock in my brain for this why conspiracy theories are so popular now in culture, they've always been popular, obviously, right? The you know, the paranoid mind is is a fixture in all of history is, but especially American history. These these theories, however strange or stupid or completely implausible, they might be on a given subject, they give people an understanding of why the world feels unfair or wrong or bad, right? And in a moment where there are a lot of people who are struggling, who are very disenchanted, who feel that there is no predictable pathway to success or that the American dream is out of reach for them. Even something as small as the key fob conspiracy explains one small bit of why they feel like crap all the time. Yeah, one of the things that I have taken from the past from this Trump era, the past decade of discussion is one of the it's a it's a trope. It's the same something we are supposed to say that things are increasingly difficult for people that they're not that it's understandable that there's a lot of resentment and anger. I find myself maybe I'm just becoming crankier less and less patient with that. I mean, if you're an American in the year 2020, you live at the apex, the summit of civilization, never so much material prosperity, never so much medical prosperity. And in particular, the science of preserving life and health has never been better, never approached what you have today. So when you see people saying the my conspiracy theory is to reject the gifts of modern medical science and to subject my child to measles. So you know what? I don't believe it that you're having such a tough time. All right. Anyway, if you are having a touch of touch on him, I think that doesn't excuse you. And if you're if your response to having a tough time is to deny your child the measles vaccine, then your tough time may be a result of your own deficiencies, not something that society is doing. If you're going to do something that callus negligent, potentially homicidal to your child, you know, you're to blame. You're the problem. It's not the bankers. It's not deindustrialization. It's not the crisis of modernity. It's you, dumbhead. It's you vaccinate your child. Well, first off, I fully agree on that is if you are denying your your child vaccines or things like that, that is that is on you. I'm not and I understand that there is this fatigue with trying to trying to rationalize the reasons why people are, you know, falling down these rabbit holes or doing ridiculous things. I kind of hold it in my mind slightly differently, which is which is that I'm not seeing everyone as just these absolutely passive observers. But I do see people as being relatively easily manipulated, right? When you combine this idea of I am frustrated, I feel bad. I can't see, you know, the progress of, you know, modernity in this way. When you combine that with really savvy manipulators and then a culture that forms around all of that, right? A tribalism that forms around this that, okay, it's not only that I'm denying, you know, I'm I don't believe in vaccines, I'm denying this. It becomes a group, a team, a thing, you know, a cohort, a sense of belonging. And that is a very strong psychological bond. And so it's not necessarily that I'm saying these people don't have any agency or that they can't be blamed for, you know, essentially endangering the lives of their children or doing whatever awful thing. But I see this as like all of these systems making it very hard for people to break out of that mold, to do the right thing, to go against the grain of those people. - So while we're talking about agency, what are we gonna do? So here we are, we're now co-manufacturers of this reality and a very modest way, but there we are. We're part of it. What do we do? How do we be forces for good and effective forces for good rather than forces for ill or ineffective forces for good? - I think that's really, really difficult. Something that our boss, Adrienne Lafrance, who's the executive editor of the Atlantic said on a podcast I did with her recently, which was about, it was we were covering the Epstein files, the first dump of all of this, right? And at the very end of the podcast, I asked, well, what the heck did we learn here, right? There's all this information. And one thing that she said about this, the durability of the Epstein conspiracy theory, is that people still want the truth, right? That is also at the heart of all of this conspiratorial crap that we are dealing with. There are a lot of people who have this impulse who want the truth, who believe they're not getting the truth. And that leads them down these difficult paths. But that is actually our job, right? We are purveyors of, in an ideal world of that, we are trying to harness this, we are trying to do that. So, I almost think in some ways that the, whatever you want called the mainstream media, you and me, whatever it is, we need to take that back, I think, more strongly than we do, right? We can be a little milk toast about this and say, oh, I think we need to say, if you're on a hunt, if you're trying to be a digital vigilante investigator, then you need to be looking here for the truth, which is here, and we are the people who are going to do that job. One of my new resolutions is I am going to not only refrain from using but actually actively object to the phrase mainstream media, because if many times more people watch Candaceau and Joe Rogan, then CNN or the PBS News Hour, if conspiracy media get much bigger views than the Atlantic or even the New York Times, they're the mainstream, the crackpots are the mainstream. And so I think one of the great unlearnings we have, there is a kind of tepidity, lukewarmness that pervades what I would call the people are trying to be honest, and a great passion that animates those who are either consciously or unwittingly or gullibly dishonest. And so one of the things I think we need to embrace, and this is what I'm trying to do, is an idea, there's something a little counter-cultural about what we're doing, yet we're doing what in 1975 would have been considered mainstream, we're fact-checking, we're running things past lawyers. If we make a mistake, we correct them. I died last week, two weeks ago, I made a mistake on air, I said something based on the information we had available at the time, but the Bondi beach killing, there were eyewitness reports that the police had been slow and I quoted those or referenced those and a week later when that turned out not to have been correct, I corrected myself, those kinds of things, those habits. But we need to understand that those are, not the mainstream, the mainstream is paranoia, conspiracy, deception, it is a counter-cultural act to stand up for integrity and truth and self-correction. - I love this because I fully do agree, and I think that this posture of having to apologize because you're a part of an institution or something like that. I like the idea of reversing that quite a bit. I think it's very strong, I think, I think to something that I have noticed that has been very frustrating to me and I've talked about this on a past episode a little bit, is this idea that so many of the things inside, let's just call them media institutions or professionalized media, right? That are there in order to build trust among readers and viewers or credibility, right? The idea of fact-checking, the ideas of editing, right? Those things have been truly weaponized against, right? Like if you look at something I've always found about the right-wing media as it's built up in the Trump era that's fascinating, is the absolute lack of editing. They will do live streams that are three, four hours long. Joe Rogan's not explicitly the right-wing media, but like his podcast as a template, those episodes are often three hours plus long. There's this idea of no editing, of no fact-checking, of no polish in any sense. And the idea that behind it from them is we're giving you everything unvarnished, right? Look at all these other people who are editing things. What are they hiding? Where actually that's BS, it's just quality control. - I think you should, again, not to be pedantic, but this is not a problem just for right-wing media. There are left-wing versions of this, and there will be more. I think the extreme right got a certain head start, and I think that will not endure if this is the future. One of the things, but you may raise this point, and it makes me think, and this is something that, again, that the Atlantic can really contribute. So when modern buildings begin to be constructed in the late 19th century, you start with a steel frame, and then you put around it all this limestone and woodwork to conceal the steel frame. And the modern architecture, let's take all that limestone off and show people the steel frame. We'll have the steel frame with the glass, and they can see the integrity and honesty of the building, and realize why the building stands up to all these many stories. I think that's a little bit the way professionalized media, that's a good term, respond, which is the steel frame was the structure of reporting and research and editing and fact-checking, and legal checking, and then it was hidden behind the writing. That was the limestone. And maybe we need to take the limestone off and show people a little bit more how the building works and bring people into the process, and how we think, why we choose stories the way we do, why we choose not to do certain stories, and how we do our method. Maybe that's one of the things that we're doing this very day to talk a little bit about, every time we invite somebody, we're making a selection. Who do we choose, who do we not choose? And in the podcast world, you know that, well, such and such a person, when he or she appeared on such and such a show, got so many hits. And this other person, who I'm thinking of inviting, has never been on a show, or when they are on a show, they got many fewer hits. I'm nonetheless, nonetheless, I'm going with person number two. And maybe I need to talk more with my audience, but why I've chosen this person, who is credible and knowledgeable, and whom I believe has something to say, and not the other. - Yeah, this is always the tension here, right? Because, and this is a little bit too, where I do bring the algorithms into play here. I think that the algorithms are optimized for this, like, illiberalism, this sensationalism, this, like, and I think right now, that is something that is far more prevalent on the right. Like, these algorithms are helping them in an outsized way. So that's why I don't always know, like, you know, when you say we're going to be seeing a lot more of this type of content from the left, I think that that's true that the left is going to try to build out an ecosystem like this, but it feels far less like it has a very specific political valence and much more of a valence of a kind of nihilism. And that's obviously can be, you know, just as dangerous as anything. Well, but it's not nihilism, it's anti-institutional of a different kind. And maybe that's one of the things we can't, I mean, one of the things that, when you and I talked in advance about what we were going to do, and I'm taking showing the cladding, we did talk in advance about what the show would be, some of the lessons we've learned from doing this. But one of the, I've tried some things that haven't worked, and one of the things I've learned about this medium is it's not television. It looks like television, but it's not. The way television interviews went or go to the extent there is still television, is there would be somebody who is important, who had something they didn't want to say on television. And there would be a professional questioner whose job was to get the person who didn't want to say the thing, to say that thing. And if you watch like the Sunday morning shows, this is the game in its most classic form. And afterwards that the politician can congratulate himself because he went on TV, took 11 minutes of everybody's time and said nothing of interest. And that's a win for him. And I thought, you know what, that doesn't work anymore. If you don't want to say something interesting, I don't know why I'm asking people to spend 11 minutes or in my case, 40 minutes with you. I'm only gonna ask you if you are going to play the game. If you say, you know what, I'm here to communicate. So I've learned, invite fewer politicians because they're still in that mode of the value to them is what they don't say. And I've also sort of stumbled along, and I didn't intend this, but you get, there's a lot of video that is about producing the 90 second clip where the people explode and yell at each other. And if you watch the whole thing, it's all like, it's like a real game. ritualized performance of building up to the moment of confrontation and the confrontation produces the viral video. And I was, you know what? I don't find that tremendously useful either. That what I'm increasingly looking for is people have something they want to say. They agree with me that it should be said. We're not fighting each other about whether to say it. And we're also not looking to have a confrontation. We're looking at this as a kind of cumulative iterative building process that leaves the user maybe not shocked at the end, but knowing something more than the user did when the user started. This is why I've always in my career. I rarely, my version of this is rarely wanting to interview CEOs. There's always been this big. Yeah, have them on the thing. They have everything to lose in this situation. As you said, they're playing a pre-vent, you know, DFES. They're running out the clock, whatever you want to call it, right? On the whole interview. I agree with that. Do you, one thing I'm curious about since you have more experience in this realm, is do you think about weeks and weeks of it? Weak. Yeah, I know. Hey, on the internet, we're talking dog ears here, right? Do you think about the parasocial relationship? Like, are you thinking about building a relationship with audience members, people who are interested in coming for, you know, for your thoughts, but also just like investing in that relationship with them and bringing them into your world, into your mind, into how you think. Do you look at it that way or do you say, no, today, like, this is the subject I want people to learn about. And I just think about it on that, on that very granular, episodic basis. Very much the former, very much the former, because I think when I think of this as being counter cultural, the podcast is, this, I'm saying, this is a person you probably have never heard of. I'm going to talk to you today. But I think they're important. I think, and I think more important, they're a good faith actor. So even if we end up having some disagreements, I don't think they're going to lie to you. If I did, they wouldn't be here. And I'm not here to fight with them. If I, if I, people I fight with, I don't want. This is my actual office. This is where I write. These are my actual books. These are my actual personal souvenirs. I, if I weren't doing a show that the souvenirs would be arranged a little differently in the office than they are now, I wouldn't have them all behind my head. Okay. I would have them in front of me. I can look at them. But they'd still, they'd be in a different location in this actual room. These are my actual paintings on the walls. And the books behind me are not chosen because I'm trying to, they're not my books or something that I'm trying to endorse. It's just, my books are arranged by alphabetical order and you're getting, you know, the M's. I was in the middle of this, so, and, and I do try to be quite expressive. I talk about what I think. I talk about the books I'm reading because what I have to accept is that the days of Walter Cronkite are gone. The people were imitating Walter Cronkite don't have his ethic. The people who are being watched are people who are building relationships. And I think some of these relationships may leap the bound. I mean, I have many relationships that are not par, that began as parosocial, that are now real. People I may not see very often, but who I correspond with in a candid way. And I just think that's the way it's going to have to be because we can't leave the most powerful tools in modern media only in the hands of the devil servants. I fully agree. I mean, this is, those are my friends there. I mean, like, it's, it's, it's a window. It's a window into this. I do find it, what I have found as, as a challenge though is, it is trying to play the game a little bit with the platforms while also trying to do what you're talking about, right? Because the game not only does it reward the sensationalism, all this different stuff, it rewards having people on who have good YouTube channels already, right? I mean, if you, if you bring on, I brought on my first episode, this YouTuber Hank Green, right? And now YouTube allows you to have a little collaboration thing so you guys can share your audiences with each other. And it incentivizes that game of instead of bringing on the person who no one's ever heard of who's actually way smarter than everyone else here and can give you the conversation that is much more enriching. You have to sort of try to play this game. And, and similarly, like trying to have a, have a conversation about something that is, that people might not think is that interesting. It's not necessarily, I mean, it can. It's not necessarily going to do as well as hold on, let us jump on, on the Epstein news right after. That is, you know, my most successful episode is chasing the news, is chasing the thing that YouTube's algorithm already knows is sticky. And I've watched, I would love to know if you've seen this. Because I cover this stuff, I'm really interested in the dynamic of what I call platform dynamics, how the different content spreads around. And I have watched us upload some of these videos to YouTube. And I have watched them start to move in a really interesting, like, like, you know, up, into the, up into the right direction on the graph and then install immediately. And it's, you're watching an algorithmic, not suppression because that's, that's kind of ridiculous to say. But you're watching something happen, right? It is, it is moving. And then it kind of stops either. It's reached the audience of people that care in that sense or, and I find that, I find that really hard because when we're talking about trying to do the work that we want to do in this good faith way, in a way that is, is, is hopefully, you know, giving people some, some responsible tools to actually learn about the world in a way that we feel is credible and true. I think it's really, it makes me very frustrated to have to work against these powerful other forces that are goading you into being the worst version of yourself. Well, that's, that's, that I share that feeling. It's true. You still have to lean against the wind. And one of the things I think a lot about, I'm not, I don't want to make this a two part as an political point. I'm, I'm, so I'm going to invoke Trump not to make a point specifically here about him. But I think a lot of people look at the politics of the past decade and say, it's, you know, it was about, above all, it was giant waste of time. So in, in 2015, the United States had a series of very serious enduring problems. And then we changed, we mentioned public debt, the educational performance of children from the least advantage backgrounds, the problem of bringing China peacefully into the world of commerce and helping, helping, applauding that they're raising so many people at a poverty, not letting them push the rest of the world around, but also try to stay out of a war with them too. Many, many more. And ten years later, we've made zero progress on any of them. It's just been a giant waste of time. We're fighting about whether or not one ego maniac should put his name on the front of the nation's leading concert hall. What, what a stupid way to spend for the world's greatest power to spend a decade. So I think that, but what I also think is this, for those of us who have been through this experience, yeah, we're no far, we've made no progress over the past ten years on these important enduring chance questions. But we've also learned something about defending things that are important. And it's made many people better people, many people become better versions of themselves. Many people have discovered things that were important that they didn't know. And a lot of us have had the experience of saying, you know, we, I know for myself, I'll speak very personally. I was on my way out of politics. I had reached a certain age. I'd had certain personal reverses. I wanted out and it pulled me back. And I'm not entirely happy to be back in that way. But I do have this feeling of, to some, without being a megalomaniac about this, because it's very small, but it's true of everybody in each of our small degree, we're needed. We're doing something that's needed. And in pushing back against the algorithm machine on this platform, we're also doing something that's needed. And that's a very valuable human experience. And even if it fails, it's still valuable. I'm stuck on the idea of the non-apologetic countercultural. We are the underdog in some sense mentality that you've noted here. And it's just very candidly. It's very empowering, right? Because it allowed, I think that there has been so much apologizing and/or trying to remain overly deferential to, again, to people who are trying to tear the world down because this is our job to be the rational cool heads in the room, right? And I think that coming from the perspective of these other places are outperforming. They have the bigger audiences and not trying to take the worst from them, but trying to take that kind of scrappiness, that mantle of being an insurgent, trying to be an insurgent force. And I think that's really powerful. I would love for more stewards of, let's call it, again, professional or institutional media to look at it that way. Because I think it's much more hard-headed, it's much more combative, it feels like it gives a purpose, right? I feel like in the second Trump administration, the first Trump administration, the media seem to have a pretty explicit purpose, right? Let's shine a light on this thing. Hopefully it will restore the pillars of democracy, right? Or, you know, girt, girt everyone in that way. And I think that for the most part, broadly, it kind of lost its sea. nature, right? Okay, this guy won a second time. What is our function? What do we do? Does what we do have any effect? And I think there's been this grasping trying to find the purpose and I think that that is something of a purpose that people can use, right? It's to say let's come back. So many human beings and so many historical situations. Some of them so much more terrible and dangerous than anything we face soldiers and seemingly lost causes and metaphorical soldiers and metaphorically seeming lost causes who just kept going with one thought, I'm not going to let the bastards win. And sometimes that's all you need. I think I think that I think that should be that should be the new model, right? Get rid of democracy dies and darkness. The past hurts my eye and I may emphasize the eye and anyone who's watching. You're the eye. I want to things I often point out if you have one of these and we all do, you have more communication power in your hand than Walter Cronkite ever commanded. So we all have to use it wisely. Think about what you share. Think about what you trust. Think about whom you believe and encourage others to do the same. And that's why and we're also going to encourage you to share what you do believe, which is this program in Charlize and and and and to join us in being co-publishers because that's what we all are. We're all co-publishers. And I think one I have to say when this is invoked, you have all that communication power and one of the one of the best things you can do both for yourself but also for others is to know when not to use it to know when to step away from it. You know, because that is a huge problem. So thanks so much for making the time for me today and and congratulations on the new show. We're co-publishing this. This is an interesting experiment and let's make it flourish. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you. All right. That's it for us here. Thank you again to David from for the David from Show Galaxy Brain crossover. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. My colleague David's show drops every Wednesday. You can subscribe to the Atlantic's YouTube channel and you can get both or you can subscribe to Galaxy Brain on Apple or Spotify or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you enjoyed this, remember you can support our work, the work of all the journalists at the Atlantic by subscribing to the publication and you can do that at the Atlantic dot com slash listener. That's the Atlantic dot com slash listener. Thanks so much. Happy new year and I'll see you on the internet. [Music] This episode of Galaxy Brain was produced by Nathaniel from and edited by Claudine Abade. He was engineered by Dave Grine. Our theme music is by Rob Smersiac. Claudine Abade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio and Andrea Valdes is our managing editor. I'm Ann Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? The new season of Autocracy in America, available now. [BLANK_AUDIO]