Facts vs. Clicks: How Algorithms Reward Extremism

Galaxy Brain’s Charlie Warzel joins David Frum to discuss how our online information became so untrustworthy and how we can fight back. Plus: Why America’s Founding Fathers would be appalled by Trump 250 years later, and Edward Berenson’s The Trial of Madame Caillaux.

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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on the upcoming 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. He examines the many actions President Donald Trump has taken that run counter to the ideals articulated in 1776, and considers how the Founders’ constitutional genius may ultimately be what frustrates Trump’s attempt to consolidate power.

David is then joined by his Atlantic colleague Charlie Warzel, a staff writer and the host of the Galaxy Brain podcast, to discuss the temptations that come with launching a new podcast and the challenge of serving an audience that often rewards extreme content. Together, they talk about the responsibility that comes with hosting a podcast in a media environment that prizes clicks over truth. They also explore how conspiracy theorists have come to function as an alternate reality of “mainstream media,” and why the fight for truth may not yet be lost.

Finally, David closes with a discussion of Edward Berenson’s The Trial of Madame Caillaux and what it reveals about how future generations may come to view our own beliefs.

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be my Atlantic colleague, Charlie Warzel, the host of the Galaxy Brain podcast, and we’ll be talking about our experiences as new podcast hosts. We both launched podcasts this year. Some of the temptations, some of the dangers, and some of the lessons that we have learned from this year in podcasting. My book this week will be a 1992 history book, The Trial of Madame Caillaux, a study of a sensational sex and murder trial in pre–World War I France. But before getting to either of those things, I want to open with some end-of-year thoughts as we conclude 2025 and move into 2026. 2026, of course, is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, in 1776, and is a powerful anniversary symbol in the American mind. As we move into this year, there are so many things that are going to be memorable and important and wonderful to celebrate. There are also some things happening that are really weird. One of the weirdest of them is a press release by the U.S. Mint just a few weeks ago. They are considering honoring the 250th anniversary of American independence with a set of commemorative, or dollar coins, featuring the image of President Donald Trump.

Now, it’’s not literally unprecedented for the United States to put living people on the coinage. It’s not even totally unprecedented for them to put living politicians on the coinage. The first dollar bill had the face of Salman Chase, Secretary of the Treasury in Lincoln’’s Cabinet, on the dollar bill. Salman Chase was a famous egomaniac. One of his contemporary colleagues in the Republican Party said, He’s an excellent man. I think that’s the quote. He’s an excellent man, but he’s got the delusion that the Christian Trinity has four persons in it instead of three, the fourth being Salman Chase himself. So it’’s not unprecedented. There may be other examples as well, but it is strange and shocking at any time for a living person, and especially a living president, to propose to put himself on the coinage of the money of the United States. And if a Founding Father saw that, I think they would be kind of startled. They would be more startled, however, at some more serious things that are happening.

Some things that actually, unlike the dollar coin, which is just a project, have already happened in the year 2025. We have seen the president of the United States impose taxes at his sole volition. The Trump Treasury Department issued a release a few days ago that boasted that they had collected $200 billion in tariffs over the year 2025. That’s $200 billion of taxes not authorized by Congress and a flagrant violation of the ideas and literal language of Article 1 of the Constitution, which puts both taxes and tariffs in the hands of Congress. The president and his team are proposing to spend that $200 billion. They’ve had many ideas about how to spend it. Maybe they should give the money to the farmers. Maybe there should be a tax rebate. Maybe they should do something else. But all of those ideas for spending or tax rebates, again, all of those are congressional authority that the president is arrogating to himself—something else that would have startled the founders of the country all those 250 years ago.

We’ve seen the growth of an enormous federal police force, ICE, which has recruited and seems to take orders not from any kind of institution of law but from, again, a small team around the president, an almost personal police force of a kind that the United States has not seen before, certainly not on such a scale. And carrying out actions that, again, would have seemed unimaginable only a little while ago. Mass roundups without any kind of due process; mass deportations. Deportation, of course, is a total presidential authority, but usually there’s some kind of hearing. And, of course, until now, you almost always—the deported person is sent back to the place the deported person came from, not to a third country to which they had no contact, and not under conditions that are tantamount to torture or at least serious human-rights abuse. You would send them home. It’s not a crime to be illegally present in the United States. It’s a violation of the law, but it’s not something that you should be tortured for. You should be put on a plane, given a hot meal, and warned, Don’t come back, you’re breaking the rules. We’ve seen the rise of presidential retaliation against media institutions using the regulatory apparatus of the state, regulatory apparatus that belongs to everybody, not just to him. And then using those same grants of threats, grants of regulatory favors or threats of the withholding of regulatory favors, to rearrange or redirect existing media companies to be more favorable to him, sometimes successfully, sometimes less so, but always with a kind of intent that would have seemed very sinister from the point of view of the founders of the American Republic. And we have seen, maybe most disturbing of all, the use of presidential war powers without any involvement of any kind of legal authority, any kind of congressional authority. We’re on the cusp, apparently, of some kind of military action against Venezuela—maybe airstrikes, maybe clandestine strikes of commandos, maybe something more. There’s no pretense that there’s any congressional authorization of that. And over the Christmas holiday, the president fired missiles into Nigeria, intervening in Nigerian civil strife, again, with no pretense of any kind of authorization by anyone other than the president at his own whim. So the big question for the year 2026 is: How far has the country drifted from those ideals of 1776 as formalized in the Constitution of 1787 and all the amendments afterwards? And how does the United States move back to the country it intended to be at the beginning, that Americans believed it to be until very recently, and that I think most Americans still want it to be.

Now, here’s some good news. It does seem like over the course of 2025, that these lawless actions have lost some of their impact and power. The bad guys seem to be losing a little political altitude as we move into 2026. I don’t want to be overconfident about that. I don’t want to issue false promises. But it does seem like the ebb and flow of political power is not favoring those who want to use arbitrary power in the way they’ve used it. Some examples: There does seem to be, in this second Trump term, a real loss of focus, an inability to keep the main thing the main thing. The battle over renaming the Kennedy Center the Trump Kennedy Center: That seems like a perfect example of something that any serious authoritarian president would not waste energy over. What does he care? He’s staffed it with his cronies. They’re going to do the shows that he likes; he’s gonna be able to blackball the people he doesn’t like. Does he really need to put his name on it? Does he need to host the Kennedy Honors on prime-time television? Is that really something that he needs to invest energy in? And even the dollar coins, that just makes enemies. Why are you doing that? What is the petty, pathetic need that makes you trade the substance of political power for these childish shows? But that need is there and it’s a political fact, and it’s an expensive political fact—and therefore for those who oppose the authoritarian project, a hopeful political fact.

But more substantially, two other things are happening that are really changing the political calculus as we move into the year 2026. One is the weakening of the American economy. One of the things that any successful authoritarian knows is you have to get the economy right. People will put up with a lot if they’re feeling prosperous. As they enter 2026, fewer and fewer Americans are feeling prosperous. Prices are rising; job creation is stalling. The center of energy in the American economy is the artificial-intelligence-investment boom. That may continue, it may not, but through the rest of the economy, it’s trouble. Everywhere there’s signs of trouble: rising corporate bankruptcies, defaults on automobile loans. Americans are not feeling like Trump is thinking of them as he thinks of himself. Trump 1, the theory seemed to be that the public would forgive Trump’s actions if he provided economic prosperity. Trump 2, the president is actually actively attacking prosperity through his taxes and tariffs, through his immigration policy, shrinking the American population, shrinking the American workforce. And it seems like that’s his agenda. So what do you get for putting up with it? Nothing, just a kick in the head.

But the last thing, and Michael Waldman and I discussed this earlier this year in an important podcast discussion: Trump has lost much of his bet to centralize the management of elections in his own hands. Not all of the bet. He’s still got tricks up his sleeve. There are many things he’s trying to do. But through the genius of American federalism, which is part of the genius of 1776 and 1787, election management is left in the hands of the state, of the several states.

And while it’s not impossible for a president to squeeze and coax and coerce and rig those elections, there are limits to his ability to do it. In the end, it is a state power governed by the actions of the states and administered by officials of the states. And there is a limit to how much the president can successfully intervene to corrupt or distort that process. Now, if the election is close, those interventions and distortions may be enough.

But when you have, through bad economic policy, you’ve stoked so much discontent as this administration has, you may have moved the whole political temperature—the whole political balance of political forces—beyond the margin of successful manipulation. And that means that the corrective response, that the genius of the system always anticipated as the ultimate answer to abuses, that corrective response may be coming, and 2026 may be the year that we feel it.

And now, my dialogue with Charlie Warzel.

[Music]

Frum: So The Atlantic is, today, presenting something a little different. I will interview today my colleague Charlie Warzel, who has launched his own new podcast on the Atlantic channel, Galaxy Brain. We’ll 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 gonna talk about some of the experiences, challenges, temptations of doing a podcast in this day and age, especially for The Atlantic.

And I’m happy to welcome Charlie. Charlie, congratulations on the new podcast.

Charlie Warzel: Thank you. Thank you for having me. This is great.

Frum: 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 a frontline soldier.

But we’re both familiar with being guests on podcasts, but new to hosting.

Warzel: Yes. And it’s very different. Right? It is a whole different, at least I’ve found, it’s a completely different animal being on the other side.

Frum: If I’d known how hard it was, I would’ve been nicer to my hosts.

Warzel: Exactly. Exactly. Yes. It’s very difficult to construct a conversation and have a flow and end up in the right place and follow the tributaries of a guest’s meandering mind. It’s—definitely, it’s fascinating.

Frum: Well, so here’s this thing. 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 our 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 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 balanced 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. But how do you cope with the massive incentives to do a show on Was Hitler good? Yes.

Warzel: I see this as part of a bigger struggle, right? I write a lot about technology, about media, media ecology, the ways that social media has warped or changed or transformed society. It’s a lot of what the podcast is about. And so 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, 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, right? We are now, because of the issues of discovery, because of, you know, the advent of everything from generative AI to social networks, to declining readership because a lot of the social platforms have 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, et cetera. It has pushed everything to be so much more algorithmically driven. Right. 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 be, to promote, the most sensational thing. The thing that outrages, 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? And so I look at what we’re doing right now as having to chase this type of viewership.

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? I think a lot of this is like a marketplace. And every vendor is out there needing to, you know, 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, you know, succumb to that, like, say, a random person on Twitter or X might.

Frum: 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?

Warzel: Well, so there’s a very interesting issue that I have always seen, right? I hate to blame the reader, because the reader is also in some sense—

Frum: the customer, and 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.

Warzel: 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 of different places where I’ve worked, and they say that they want to read more about the vegetables, right, like eat-your-vegetables-type stuff. They want to read about climate change more. Anyone who has worked in digital media, in any case, and has access to the metrics, 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, butinside is a very nutritional and dense and smart story.

Frum: Well, this is not a new thing. This has been true as long as there is media. I mean, I remember a passage in Proust’s great novel Remembrance of Things Past where a character says, who has a beautiful library full of hand-tooled volumes, which he never opens, and he thinks, What if every morning they were delivered to my front door in sheet paper, a copy of Pascal’s Pensées. And in that leather-bound edition up there, which I open 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. In1975, 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, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, that was the media, said, 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. There was a hundred-dollar bill lying on the sidewalk and no one picked it up. And we have a more competitive marketplace, and somebody picks it up.

Warzel: This is a little bit, though, 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? These people don’t just come out of nowhere. You know, I think very broadly of the ecosystem that you and I are now a part of, which is YouTube. YouTube’s great innovation, greatest success, the thing that has driven it to be a place where people are 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—people call it the rabbit hole, right? Where you watch something, let’s say it’s just a World War II explanation video, right? A history podcast of World War II that’s not racist or 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 one-tenth of 1 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.

Frum: Okay, I sometimes do go down World War II rabbit holes. I’m interested in the subject like every Baby Boomer. And I find that as I keep going, what the algorithm serves me is increasingly technical content. Well, what was the difference between a 16-inch and a 14-inch naval gun in World War II? 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 there is the kind of thing where we say, Ah, we’re making it a little more Hitlery. Yes, that’s the algorithm, but that’s the algorithm knowing you, your 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? He. I think in World War II, Hitler—

Warzel: I think we’re safe to say he—watching the World War II videos. I agree with that, in part. But I think that there are other elements here. I was looking a little bit into—and we talked a bit about discussing—this new media ecosystem and the extremism that it can go towards.

And 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 a very extreme voice on the right, very conspiratorial. And there’s a great column, a week ago in The New York Times by Michelle Goldberg about Candace Owens and how she has played into the conspiracy theory that Charlie Kirk was not killed by the man who was arrested. And actually had 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 these are people who are, you know, vigilante investigators, right? They’re taking all the information available on the internet, trying to follow the lead like they’re a detective pursuing a cold case. And she does a very good job at that, at bringing people along for the hunt of information and giving them these breadcrumbs and telling them, you know, This story’s not right. And I think that that is a part of why people who are looking for that, who are looking to play this role of detective, or who feel that we don’t have the full story. there’s information out there; I can piece it together because 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, 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 some Hitler now. Right? I think what it is, is they believe there’s a conspiracy.

Frum: Explain something that baffles me. So 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—say, how do I get the disc battery into the key fob?

If there’s someone there saying, Leave it on the doorstep and the leprechaun overnight with a little bit of milk, and the leprechauns will come and fix the key fob for you—you know what? I’m skipping that one. That doesn’t sound like it’s gonna work.

Warzel: Right.

Frum: So why don’t people have that response?

Like, 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, like, a common-sense meter, don’t they?

Warzel: But what if, instead, right, it was someone who is making a video who was saying, You’re getting screwed by your car company. Your car company nickels-and-dimes you on all of the things when you take it in for service. They overcharge you. They’re this big corporation, you know. They’re owned by whatever shadowy people, right, who have their own agendas in whatever, who are using your money. And, you know, they’re funding their indulgent lifestyles, and who knows what they’re doing, right,when they take their private planes, X, Y, and Z? A

And this battery thing, right, is actually a manifestation of this broader thing. There’s something bigger about the fact that your battery dies too early, right, 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.

The unlock in my brain for why conspiracy theories are so popular now in, in culture—they’ve always been popular; obviously the paranoid mind is a fixture in all of history, but especially American history. 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.

Frum: One of the things I have taken from the past, from this Trump era, the past decade of discussion, is—it’s a trope. It’s something we are supposed to say, that things are increasingly difficult for people. 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, we live, if you’re an American in the year 2026, 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, 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 such a tough time, I think that doesn’t excuse you.

And 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 gonna do something that callous, negligent, potentially homicidal to your child—you’re to blame. You are the problem.

It’s not the bankers; it’s not deindustrialization; it’s not the crisis of modernity. It’s you, dumb head. It’s you. Vaccinate your child.

Warzel: Well, first off, I fully agree that if you are denying your child vaccines or things like that, that is on you. I understand that there is this fatigue, right, with trying to rationalize the reasons why people are falling down these rabbit holes or doing ridiculous things. I kind of hold it in my mind slightly differently, which is that I’m not seeing everyone as just these absolutely passive observers, but I do see people as being relatively easily manipulated.

When you combine this idea of I am frustrated; I feel bad; I can’t see the progress of modernity in this way—when you combine that with really savvy manipulators and then a culture that forms around all of that, a tribalism that forms around this, that, okay, it’s not only that I’m denying, I don’t believe in vaccines, I’m denying this; it becomes a group, a team, a thing, 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.

Frum: So while we’re talking about agency, what are we going to do? So here we are, we’re now co-manufacturers of this reality in 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?

Warzel: I think that’s 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—we were covering the Epstein files, the first dump of all this.

And at the very end of the podcast, I asked, Well, what the heck did we learn here? 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, you know, I almost think in some ways that the, whatever you want to call it, the mainstream media, you and me, whatever it is—we need to take that back, I think, more strongly than we do. We can be a little milquetoast about this. I think we need to say that if you’re on the 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, you know, do that job.

Frum: One of my New Year’s resolutions is I’m going to not only refrain from using, but actually actively object, to the phrase mainstream media. Because if many times more people watched Candace Owens or Joe Rogan than CNN or the PBS NewsHour. 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 one of the great unlearnings we have—there is a kind of tepidity, lukewarmness, that pervades what I would call the people who are trying to be honest, and a great passion that animates those who are, either consciously or unwittingly or gullibly, dishonest.

So one of the things I think we need to embrace, and this is what I’m trying to do, is an idea—you know, there’s something a little countercultural about what we’re doing. We’re doing what in 1975 would’ve been considered mainstream. We’re fact-checking. We’re running things past lawyers.

If we make a mistake, we correct them. Two weeks ago, I made a mistake on air. I said something based on the information we had available at the time about the Bondi Beach killing, that 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. But those habits—we need to understand that those are not the mainstream. The mainstream is paranoia, conspiracy, deception, and it is a countercultural act to stand up for integrity and truth and self-correction.

Warzel: 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, too—something that I have noticed that has been very, 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. Those things have been truly weaponized against—something I’ve also found about the right-wing media as it’s built up in the Trump era that’s fascinating, is the absolute lack of editing. You know, they will do livestreams that are, you know, three, four hours long.

There’s Joe Rogan’s, not explicitly the right-wing media, but, like, his podcast as a template. You know, 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.

Look at all these other people who are editing things. What are they hiding? Where actually that’s, you know, that’s BS. That’s just quality control.

Frum: 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. The extreme right got a certain head start. And I think that will not endure if this is the future. You know, 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 on around it all this limestone and woodwork, to conceal the steel frame. And the modernist architecture—you know, 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, responded. 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—you know, every time we invite somebody, we’re making a selection. Who do we choose? Who do we not choose? And in the podcast world, there are people who are, 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 were on a show, they got many fewer hits. Nonetheless, I’m going with person No. 2, and maybe I need to talk more with my audience about why I’ve chosen this person who is credible and knowledgeable, and whom I believe has something worth saying and not the other.

Warzel: Yeah. This is always the tension here, right? And this is a little bit, too, where I bring the algorithms into play here. I think that the algorithms are optimized for this, like, illiberalism, this sensationalism. And I think right now that is something that is far more prevalent on the right.

These algorithms are helping them in an outsized way. So that’s why I don’t always know, when you say we’re gonna be seeing a lot more of this type of content from, you know, from the left. I think that that’s true, that, 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 I, and that’s obviously, it can be, you know, just as dangerous as anything.

Frum: Well, it’s not nihilism. It’s anti-institutional of a different kind. And one of the things that—when you and I talked in advance about what we were going to do, and I’m showing the cladding, we did talk in advance about what the show would be—some of the lessons we’ve learned from doing this.

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. So 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, 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 going to 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 I don’t know that—there’s a lot of video that is about producing the 92nd clip where the people explode and yell at each other. And if you watch the whole thing, it’s all like a ritualized performance of building up to the moment of confrontation, and the confrontation produces the viral video.

And I realized, You know what? I don’t find that tremendously useful either. 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.

Warzel: This is why I’ve always, in my career, I, rarely—my version of this is rarely wanting to interview CEOs.

You have them on the thing. They have everything to lose in this situation. As you said, they’re playing a prevent, defense, they’re running out the clock, whatever you wanna call it, right? Yeah. On the whole interview. I agree with that. One thing I’m curious about, since you have more experience in this realm.

Frum: Weeks and weeks of it!

Warzel: Weeks, yeah. I know. Hey, on the internet, though, we’re talking dog years 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 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, Nope, 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?

Frum: Very much the former, very much the former. Because when I think of this as being countercultural, I’m saying, This is a person you probably have never heard of I’m going to talk to today. But I think they’re important; 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. 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.

If I weren’t doing a show, the souvenirs would be arranged a little differently in the office than they are now. I wouldn’t have them all behind my head where I can’t look at them. I would have them in front of me where I can look at them. Yeah. 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 I’m trying to endorse. My books are arranged by alphabetical order and you’re getting, you know, the ms ’cause we’re in the middle of this.

So, 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 who are 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—that began as parasocial that are now real. People I may not see very often, but whom 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’s servants.

Warzel: I fully agree. I mean, those are my friends there. I mean, it’s a window. It’s a window into this. What I have found as a challenge, though, is trying to play the game a little bit with the platforms while also trying to do what you are 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 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 similarly, trying to have a conversation about something that people might not think is that interesting—it’s not necessarily going to do as well as, Hold on, let us jump 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, 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’ve watched them start to move in a really interesting, like, up into the right direction on the graph and then stall immediately. And it’s, you’re watching an algorithmic—not suppression, because that’s kind of ridiculous to say, but you’re watching something happen, right?

It is moving and then it kind of stops. Either it’s reached the audience of people that care in that sense, or—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 hopefully giving people some responsible tools to actually learn about the world in a way that we feel is credible and true, I think 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.

Frum: Well, I share that feeling. It’s true, of course, but you still have to lean against the wind. And one of the things I think a lot about, I don’t want to make this a too-partisan political point, but I’m sorry, 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, you know, Above all, it was a giant waste of time. So in 2015, the United States had a series of very serious enduring problems: climate change, we mentioned; public debt; the educational performance of children from the least advantaged backgrounds; the problem of bringing China peacefully into the world of commerce and applauding that they’re raising so many people out of poverty, not letting them push the rest of the world around, but also trying to stay out of a war with them, too; many, many more.

And 10 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 egomaniac actually put his name on the front of the nation’s leading concert hall. What a stupid way 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, we’ve made no progress over the past 10 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 peopl