Facts Vs. Clicks: How Algorithms Reward Extremism

26:39But what if instead, right, it was someone who was 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. 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, right, on your key fob.

27:22And that's the thing because it opens up this world to people where they say, okay, now I understand. Like the unlock in my brain for this why conspiracy theories are so popular now in culture. They've always been popular, obviously, right? You know, the paranoid mind is a fixture in all of history, but especially American history. And 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.

28:22Yeah. One of the things I have taken from the past, from this Trump era, the past decade of discussion, is one of the, it's a trope. It's something we are supposed to say, that things are increasingly difficult for people, that they're not, 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.

29:01So 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 going to do something that callous, negligent, potentially homicidal to your child, you're to blame. You're the problem.

29:37It'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. If you are denying your child vaccines or things like that, that is on you. I understand that there is this fatigue 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, right?

30:22When you combine this idea of, I am frustrated, I feel, 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 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 essentially endangering the lives of their children or doing whatever awful thing.

31:09But I see this as 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 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? I think that's really, really difficult. Uh, something, okay. Something that our, uh, that our boss, uh, Adrian LaFrance, who's the executive editor of the Atlantic said on a, on a podcast I did with her recently, which was about, it was, we were covering the, uh, the, the Epstein files, the first dump of all this.

31:58Right. And at the very end of the podcast, I asked, well, what, what the, what the heck did we learn here? Right. We, 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 in an ideal world of that.

32:38We 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. Right. We can be a little milquetoast about this and say, you know, oh, I think we need to say, like, if you're on a hunt, if you're trying to be a digital vigilante investigator, then you need 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 Year's resolutions is I am going to not only refrain from using, but actually actively object to the phrase mainstream media.

33:20Because if many times more people watched Candace Owen 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 I think 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. And 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.

34:02We'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. Last week, 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. There were eyewitness reports that the police had been slow, and I quoted those or site 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.

34:35The mainstream is paranoia, conspiracy, deception. It is a countercultural 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 too, 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?

35:19That 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. You know, they will do live streams 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.

36:07And the idea that behind it from them is we're giving you everything on varnished, right? 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, 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 may, 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.

36:47So 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 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, respond, which is the seal frame was the structure of reporting and research and editing and fact-checking and legal checking.

37:24And 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, you know that, well, such and such a person, when he or she appeared on such and such a show, got so many hits.

38:01And this other person whom 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 not, nonetheless, nonetheless, I'm going with person number two. 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. Yeah. This is, this is always the tension here, right? Because I, and I, and this is a little bit too, where I, you know, 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.

38:51So 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.

39:25And 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. But 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.

39:57And 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 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.

40:34And 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 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. 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.

41:07And 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, you have them on the thing. They have everything to lose in this situation. As you said, they're playing a prevent, you know, defed, they're running out the clock, whatever you want to call it, right? on the whole interview.

41:40I agree with that. One thing I'm curious about, since you have more experience in this realm, is do you think about - Weeks and weeks of it. Weeks? Yeah, I know. Hey, on the internet, we're talking dog ears here, right? Do you think about the parasocial relationship? 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, no, today, like this is the subject I want people to learn about.

42:23And I just think about it on that very granular, episodic basis. Very much the former. Very much the former. Because I think when I think of this as being countercultural, the podcast is, 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.

42:54This is where I write. These are my actual books. These are my actual personal souvenirs. I, 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. 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 say, they're not my books or something I'm trying to endorse. It's just my books are arranged by alphabetical order and you're getting, you know, the M's because we're in the middle of this.

43:27So, 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 began as parasocial that are now real. People I may not see very often, but might 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.

44:08I fully agree. I mean, this is, those are my friends there. I mean, like it's a window, it's a window into this. I do find it, 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'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, I, 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.

44:54So 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, like trying to have a conversation about something 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 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.

45:36And I've watched, I would love to know if you've seen this. Because I cover this stuff, I'm really interested in the dynamics, 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, you know, up into the right direction on the graph, and then install immediately. And 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 stopped. Either it's reached the audience of people that care in that sense.

46:16And 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'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 – I share that feeling. It's true. 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.

46:58So 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, 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 to, many, many more.

47:37And 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 should put his name on the front of the nation's leading concert hall. 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'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 become better versions of themselves.

48:15Many people have discovered things that were important that they didn't know. And a lot of us have had the experience of saying, 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 world, but I do have this feeling of, to some, without being a megalomaniac with 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 algorithmic machine on this platform, we're also doing something that's needed.

48:53And that's a very valuable human experience. And even if it fails, it's still valuable. I I'm just 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 I just very candidly like it's very empowering right because it allows I think that there has been so much apologizing and or or you know trying trying to remain overly deferential to, again, to people who are trying to tear the world down because it's 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.

49:59And 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 hardheaded. It's much more combative. It's much more, it feels like it gives a purpose, right? I feel like in the second Trump administration, The first Trump administration, the media seemed to have a pretty explicit purpose, right? Like, let's shine a light on this thing. Hopefully it will restore the pillars of democracy, right? Or, you know, gird everyone in that way. And I think that for the most part, broadly, it kind of lost its sea nature, right?

50:49Okay, 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. There have been 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 seemingly 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.

51:25I think that should be the new motto, right? Get rid of democracy dies in darkness. I'm not going to let the bastards win. I, I, and emphasize the I. And anyone who's watching, you're the I. One of the 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 and Charlie's.

52:00And 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 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. Charlie, thanks so much for making the time for me today. And congratulations on the new show. We're co-publishing this. That's right. This is an interesting experiment. And let's make it flourish. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you.

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53:11See terms. A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Warzel onto the David Fromm Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live. Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time.

53:50It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.

54:03Thanks so much to my Atlantic colleague, Charlie Warzel, for joining me this week. As I mentioned at the beginning of the show, my book of this week is a history, The Trial of Madame Cayot. Cayot, by the way, is spelled C-A-I-L-L-A-U-X, for those unfamiliar with the peculiarities of French pronunciation. The Trial of Madame Cayot was published in 1992. It's written by the historian Edward Berenson. And it is the story of the most sensational sex and murder trial in pre-World War I France. So I'm going to just take you through the basics of the facts before getting on to why I thought this book was interesting and relevant now.

54:38So Joseph Cayot, the husband of Madame Cayot, was an important politician in pre-World War I France. He was associated with the secular left in the highly complex politics of the Third Republic. At that time, the most important newspaper of the right was a paper called Figaro. Right in France means pro-Catholic, pro-militarist. Left means more skeptical of militarism, more secular. Joseph Caillot, Madame Caillot's husband, had led a very checkered life, many affairs with many different women. Although financially, he was quite above board. Sexually, he was very public in his flamboyant personal life.

55:16Madame Caillot was his second wife. Both the women he married were divorced women. Figaro went on a campaign against him because of his political views, but they used his personal life. And they got hold of a cache, a group of personal letters that made it clear that Joseph Cayo and his second wife, Henrietta Cayo, had started their relationship while Joseph Cayo was still married to his previous wife and while Henrietta Cayo was still married to her previous husband. In other words, they hadn't divorced people and then married. They had started an extramarital affair, then divorced, then remarried.

55:51Now, this kind of thing did happen, but it was never to be spoken of. And if it were brought into the light of day, it would be a tremendously shameful thing. And Henrietta Cayo was indeed shamed. And so one day in March of 1914, she goes to a gun shop, buys a gun, tucks it into her muff, gets in her chauffeur-driven car, goes to the offices of the editor of Le Figaro, waits for him to emerge from his appointment, meets with him, shoots him dead, gets back into a chauffeur-driven car, and drives to the police station. That's March of 1914. In July, all of this goes on trial in a sensational, sensational case.

56:28Now, it's a case that involves many complex and mysterious attitudes of the time, and this is why I thought it would be interesting to talk about today. Madame Caillot argues that what happened to her was that she, a mere woman, unable to control her emotions, was so overcome by shame and rage over the exposure of her personal life in the pages of Le Figaro that as in a kind of mental out of control state, in a state of total uncontrollable passion, she went to a gun store, bought a gun, drove to the office of Le Figaro, waited for an hour and shot the editor dead and then drove in the same car to the police station.

57:07She just couldn't control herself. And the jury bought it. The all-male jury bought it. An all-male trial. There was almost no woman present in the courtroom. They bought it, that she was so overcome by her emotions. And so the reason this book is interesting is because the reason that this trial was worth resurfacing in 1992 was because of what it showed about this very different mentality of a very different time. The prosecution didn't fight the idea that if a woman were so overcome by emotion, she would be justified in shooting men dead. Instead, they tried to argue that she had acted in cold blood.

57:41And in order to make the point that the Kayos were not behaving in a proper gendered male-female relationship, one of the things they pointed out was what really should have happened here, what really should have happened was Mr. Kayo should have challenged the editor of the Figaro to a duel and fought him instead of letting his wife do his dirty work for him. No problem with killing somebody or at least attempting to kill them, but it should have been the man, not the woman who did it. But the woman, because she did it, she was able to fall back on this excuse that she was overcome by passion.

58:11Now, as you read this book from this distance in time, and of course, 1992 is now some distance in time as 1992 was from 1914 when all of these events happened, you're struck by the strangeness and alienness of the mental atmosphere that is described in this trial of a world in which women regarded as totally the playthings of their emotions, in which male honor required this kind of private vengeance and that the sin here was not that there was private vengeance, but that the wife did it instead of the husband. And one way you can react to that is by reading the history of this bygone time and saying, weren't they foolish?

58:48Aren't we wiser? But another thing that might happen, and this is why I found the book so interesting to read at the turn of the year, 2025, is that also looking back at a time where people believe things that we would regard as pretty crazy, pretty irresponsible, pretty wicked, actually, it makes you a little humble and think, what do we believe that is going to look as crazy 100 years from now? Maybe it's not that they were dumb and we're smarter. Oh, that's not impossible. Maybe that's true. But maybe it's also true. They had a set of delusions that we can see through, and we hold a set of delusions that future generations will see through.

59:25Maybe we should have more awareness of the ways in which we might be wrong and understand that it's precisely those views of which we are most certain. Because the one thing that everybody in the trial agreed upon was that if you were gripped by overwhelming passion, then you were entitled to kill somebody who had insulted you. They all agreed on that. They just disagreed about who should have done it, the husband or the wife. Maybe the things we are most certain about are exactly the things where we are most likely to be led astray. We talked a little bit in our conversation today about the rabbit holes of World War II history.

59:59One of the reasons to study history is to study things other than World War II. It's not just D-Day and Midway all the time. It's entering into the mentalities of a time that looked pretty close to our own. I mean, pre-1914 France, they had the telephone, they had the motor car, kind of clumsy versions of both, but they had them. They had revolvers, they had the mass press, but they also had ways of thinking that to us seem completely strange. And how will we look to our grandchildren and our great edition of the David Frum show. Happy New Year to all who are observing the passage of time from 2025 to 2026.

1:00:39The show will post on December 31st, but some of you may be watching it, in the 250th anniversary year of American independence. So as we discussed that at the opening of the show, whatever qualms and doubts and anxieties I expressed then, I hope this is a deeply meaningful quarter millennium event for all Americans. Thanks so much for watching. Remember, the best way to support the work of this podcast is to subscribe to the Atlantic. That way you support all of my colleagues, including Charlie as well. Follow us on social media platforms, x at David Fromm, Instagram at David Fromm. And please, if you can, share and subscribe to this content.

1:01:16It does do the work that we talked about today of bringing something that's more honest to the attention of more people. That's it for this week. That's it for this year. See you in 2026 on The David Fromm Show.

1:01:51This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grine. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Abed is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm David Frum. Thank you for listening. A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Warzel onto The David Frum Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live.

1:02:36Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time. It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.