How do you build a streaming service from scratch? On this week’s “Galaxy Brain,” Charlie Warzel speaks with Sam Reich, the CEO of Dropout, a comedy streaming platform that’s found success eschewing the growth-at-all-costs model of the mega streamers. The two discuss the pre-YouTube days of online video and how Reich acquired Dropout, formerly known as the internet site CollegeHumor, for $0. They talk about how comedy has evolved online, how to build a cinematic universe of content, and whether ...
May 22, 2026•42 min•Ep. 29
How should you feel about the AI boom? In this episode of Galaxy Brain , Charlie Warzel speaks with Chris Hayes about how to emotionally calibrate our response to this dizzying AI moment. Hayes describes why AI gives him “The Bad Feeling,” and how it led him to report on AI like an anthropologist would. The two discuss why AI is described as “the jagged frontier,” and they explore the distinction between using AI for creative thinking versus grunt work. Get more from your favorite Atlantic voice...
May 15, 2026•47 min•Ep. 28
On this week’s episode of “Galaxy Brain,” Charlie Warzel talks with his Atlantic colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany about what our phones are doing to us. Tiffany recently wrote about swapping her iPhone for a flip phone as part of a movement called “Month Offline.” Kaitlyn talks through her personal experience: the joys and inconveniences of a dumbphone and the difficulty of unplugging completely. Warzel and Tiffany talk about the growing smartphone backlash, legal cases against “big tech,” and how, eve...
May 08, 2026•52 min•Ep. 27
What happens when the majority of content on the internet tips over into AI slop? On this episode of Galaxy Brain , Charlie Warzel talks to Max Spero, the co-founder of Pangram, an AI-detection company. They discuss how AI-detection tools work and how effective they can be at identifying what’s made by humans and what comes from a chatbot. They explore the cultural concerns around authenticity in the large language model era, and whether detection can keep up as models improve. The pair discuss ...
May 01, 2026•51 min•Ep. 26
In this episode of Galaxy Brain , Charlie Warzel talks with business writer Ed Elson about the rise of the “clip economy”—the idea that short video clips pulled from podcasts, livestreams, and other long-form content have become the dominant unit of online media, not just a promotional tool. Elson explains how figures like Andrew Tate pioneered armies of paid clippers to flood social platforms with content and how the viewership numbers on clips often perform better than the original shows. Warz...
Apr 24, 2026•43 min•Ep. 25
In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel speaks with Josh Owens, a videographer and the author of a memoir about his years working for Infowars, the media company of the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Owens traces his journey from a film-school student who stumbled onto Jones’s radio show to an insider who spent four years filming, editing, and traveling for the organization. Owens describes how Jones’s conspiracy machine works, as well as how his own moral compass was scrambled by Jones...
Apr 17, 2026•58 min•Ep. 24
On this week’s Galaxy Brain episode, Charlie Warzel is joined by New York Times technology reporter Tiffany Hsu to discuss the rise of AI influencers—synthetic avatars, often indistinguishable from real people, that are flooding social-media feeds to sell supplements and promote brands. Hsu unpacks her reporting on the combination of forces converging around it, including the wellness industry, a historically fertile ground for scammers. The pair discuss how the volume of synthetic content onlin...
Apr 10, 2026•47 min•Ep. 23
How is AI changing the way we work? This week on Galaxy Brain , Charlie Warzel is joined by Johnathan and Melissa Nightingale, two experts in management and leadership training. They discuss how chatbots and AI agents are winding their way through the workforce, offering a firsthand view of how companies are (and aren’t) adopting AI tools. The conversation covers the gap between AI hype and what’s actually happening in offices. It also touches on how overreliance on AI tools may be making bosses...
Apr 03, 2026•51 min•Ep. 22
What is Twitter’s legacy? In this episode of Galaxy Brain , Charlie Warzel traces how Twitter, now called X, evolved from a status-update tool to one of the most culturally and politically influential—and contentious—platforms of the modern internet. Charlie is joined by early Twitter executive Jason Goldman. They explore how Twitter’s core features—many invented by users—reshaped media and politics while also enabling new forms of harassment, misinformation, and attention hijacking. Goldman ref...
Mar 27, 2026•56 min•Ep. 21
Just how are powerful AI models being used in warfare overseas? In this episode of Galaxy Brain , Charlie Warzel sits down with Wired senior writer Will Knight to discuss the rise of autonomous weapons. From the origins of Project Maven to the recent falling-out between Anthropic and the U.S. Department of Defense, they trace what’s happening as artificial intelligence moves from summarizing documents to informing decisions on the battlefield. How do these weapons work? What are the safeguards? ...
Mar 20, 2026•38 min•Ep. 20
How are we still getting caught in the rain? This week’s “Galaxy Brain” explores the world of weather forecasting—specifically the apps on our phones that we have come to rely on. As climate change intensifies storms and smartphones put hyperlocal forecasts in our pockets, we’ve never had more meteorological data. And yet plenty of people lament that their weather apps can’t get it right. Charlie digs into why we obsessively refresh our weather apps, why we blame them when they’re wrong, and wha...
Mar 13, 2026•36 min•Ep. 19
Few companies have reshaped American culture as aggressively as Netflix. This week’s Galaxy Brain charts how we got here. Charlie Warzel talks with Atlantic film critic David Sims about Netflix’s strange, sweeping arc: from red DVD envelopes to a streaming colossus with 325 million subscribers. Sims explains how Hollywood initially shrugged off streaming as a novelty, only to watch Netflix reshape both distribution and the aesthetics and economics of entertainment itself. Together, they discuss ...
Mar 06, 2026•42 min•Ep. 18
Silicon Valley runs on hype cycles, and the AI boom is generating a new one—part gold rush, part ideology, and part quasi-religious devotion to building an alien intelligence. On this week’s “Galaxy Brain,” Charlie Warzel explores the culture of this boom with the writer Jasmine Sun, who’s been chronicling San Francisco’s AI scene. Sun describes what this moment feels like on the ground, including a subculture of massive salaries, and a weird pride in leaning into tech’s strangeness. Together, W...
Feb 27, 2026•37 min•Ep. 17
Silicon Valley relies on hype cycles. But for the last few weeks, AI insiders have been spooked by advances coming from their tools. On this week’s Galaxy Brain , Charlie Warzel helps listeners calibrate their anxiety about AI’s next phase. The episode examines what’s new: AI-agent coding tools that can work in the background like personal assistants. Warzel is joined by longtime technologist Anil Dash to unpack how hype and venture-capital incentives can distort the conversation around advances...
Feb 20, 2026•47 min•Ep. 16
On this week’s Galaxy Brain , host Charlie Warzel dives into the state of the music industry, where streaming economics, algorithmic discovery, and generative AI are reshaping how music is distributed as well as what it means to make music in this environment. The episode traces how playlists and opaque recommendation systems have left many artists feeling like they’re battling an algorithm. With AI-generated songs now flooding platforms, and even in one case landing on a Billboard chart , the e...
Feb 13, 2026•42 min•Ep. 15
On this week’s “ Galaxy Brain ,” Charlie Warzel takes listeners deep into the internet’s fever swamps to examine how figures who once would’ve stayed on the fringes now dominate mainstream feeds. The episode charts the rise of Clavicular, a young livestreamer who’s gone from an absurdist curiosity to a fixture in the manosphere and its adjacent right-wing influencer culture. Using Clavicular as a lens—his extreme body modification, relentless self-documentation, and a willingness to do anything ...
Feb 06, 2026•48 min•Ep. 14
On this week’s Galaxy Brain , Charlie Warzel opens with what it means to live in 2026, when our phones can drop us into graphic, real-time violence without warning—and when documenting that violence can be both traumatizing and politically consequential. Using recent footage out of Minneapolis as a lens, he explores the uneasy collision of algorithmic feeds, misinformation, and the moral weight of witnessing. Charlie also traces how viral documentation can puncture official narratives, pushing s...
Jan 30, 2026•47 min•Ep. 13
In this episode of Galaxy Brain, host Charlie Warzel speaks with the reporter Ryan Broderick about how the internet’s fragmentation of attention and facts has bled into real-world political violence in Minneapolis this month. From the viral spread of a right-wing video about day-care fraud in Minnesota to the aggressive ICE activity in the region that followed, the episode charts how online content routinely shapes government action and public perception. Broderick, who spent days in Minneapolis...
Jan 23, 2026•49 min•Ep. 12
In this episode of Galaxy Brain , Charlie Warzel confronts the growing crisis around AI-generated sexual abuse and the culture of impunity enabling it. He examines how Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok is being used to create and circulate nonconsensual sexualized images, often targeting women. Warzel lays out why this moment represents a red line for the internet: It is a test of whether society will tolerate tools that silence women through humiliation and intimidation under the guise of free speech. W...
Jan 16, 2026•40 min•Ep. 10
In this episode of “Galaxy Brain,” Charlie Warzel discusses the nightmare playing out on Elon Musk’s X: Grok, the platform’s embedded AI chatbot, is being used to generate and spread nonconsensual sexualized images—often through “undressing” prompts that turn harassment into a viral game. Warzel describes how what once lived on the internet’s fringes has been supercharged by X’s distribution machine. He explains how the silence and lack of urgency isn’t just another content-moderation failure; i...
Jan 09, 2026•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 9
In this episode of “Galaxy Brain,” Charlie Warzel opens with 5 predictions for 2026. Then, Charlie is joined by his Atlantic colleague David Frum, a staff writer and the host of T he David Frum Show 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 explor...
Jan 02, 2026•1 hr 4 min
Are your parents addicted to their phone? In this episode of Galaxy Brain , Charlie Warzel explores how technology is affecting an older generation of adults. Instead of a phone-based childhood, Warzel suggests, we may be witnessing the emergence of a phone-based retirement—one shaped by isolation, algorithmic feeds, and platforms never designed with aging users in mind. To untangle whether this is a genuine crisis or a misplaced moral panic, Warzel speaks with Ipsit Vahia, chief of geriatric ps...
Dec 26, 2025•58 min•Ep. 8
Late on the Friday before Christmas—just hours before a deadline mandated by Congress, the Department of Justice released part of the trove of documents known colloquially as the Epstein files. The contents are, at different times, unnerving, enraging, banal, and heavily redacted. At The Atlantic , we’ve been up, poring over the documents to contextualize what they mean. In this special Galaxy Brain episode, Charlie Warzel is joined by Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic ’s executive editor, and Isa...
Dec 20, 2025•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 7
In this episode of Galaxy Brain , Charlie Warzel explores the burgeoning industry of prediction markets. These platforms let people wager on everything from elections and award shows to the most trivial internet ephemera, framing bets as tradable “shares” that rise and fall like stocks. With billions in weekly trading volume, massive new funding rounds, and even a CNN partnership with the prediction-betting platform, Kalshi, prediction markets are quickly moving from a niche curiosity to a mains...
Dec 19, 2025•54 min•Ep. 6
In this episode of Galaxy Brain , Charlie Warzel turns the camera on himself to ask a simple question: Why are you seeing his face? Using YouTube’s takeover of podcasts as a starting point, he explores how video has devoured audio and turned podcasts into something closer to daytime TV and late-night talk shows. NPR’s Rachel Martin, host of the celebrity-interview show Wild Card , joins to talk about her own shift from intimate, audio-only conversations to highly visible video chats with mega-ce...
Dec 12, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 5
In this episode of Galaxy Brain , Charlie Warzel explores the strange, unsettling relationships some people are having with AI chatbots, as well as what happens when those relationships go off the rails. His guest is Kashmir Hill, a technology reporter at The New York Times who has spent the past year documenting what is informally called “AI psychosis.” These are long, intense conversations with systems such as ChatGPT that can spiral or trigger delusional beliefs, paranoia, and even self-harm....
Dec 05, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 4
In this episode of “Galaxy Brain,” Charlie Warzel sits down with Eliot Higgins, founder of the open-source investigative collective Bellingcat, to examine how our public sphere slid from healthy debate into what Higgins calls “disordered discourse.” Higgins is an early-internet native who taught himself geolocation during the Arab Spring and later built Bellingcat’s global community. He has spent the past decade exposing war crimes and online manipulation with publicly available data. Higgins ha...
Nov 28, 2025•59 min•Ep. 3
Are sports the most valuable commodity in the world? On this episode of Galaxy Brain , Charlie Warzel is joined by Pablo Torre, a longtime journalist and the host of the podcast and YouTube show Pablo Torre Finds Out . They talk about the role that sports and rampant sports betting are playing in our politics, culture, and economy. Are same-day parlays the new American Dream? Are sports leagues at risk of losing their legitimacy? And why is nobody playing the long game? Sign up for the Galaxy Br...
Nov 21, 2025•51 min•Ep. 2
In this inaugural episode of Galaxy Brain , Charlie Warzel examines the state of the internet as it stands now in November 2025 with Hank Green, a true citizen of the internet—somebody who has made a living riding the algorithmic waves of the social web. Warzel and Green look back on a time when the internet felt small, more serendipitous, and inspiring, and try to tease apart what went wrong. Are people starting to leave TikTok? How exactly did the internet turn into a misery machine? What make...
Nov 14, 2025•57 min•Ep. 1
The internet has warped public life: Politicians behave like influencers, the economy resembles a casino, and people can no longer agree upon a consensus reality. New conspiracy theories, memes, and main characters seem to pop up every day. A constant war is on for your attention, and it’s easy to feel lost. Each week, Galaxy Brain and its host, Charlie Warzel, invite you into conversations to make sense of the fire hose of information. Is AI destroying our ability to think? Do your grandparents...
Nov 04, 2025•2 min
