Introducing: Galaxy Brain with Charlie Warzel

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 have a screen-time problem? Galaxy Brain looks beyond the algorithm and anchors you to the real—however strange it may be. Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/listener. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Charlie Warzel?

  I'm Charlie Warzel and welcome to Galaxy Brain. What's Galaxy Brain? Well, the thing about reality these days is how so much of the time it feels completely surreal. The economy resembles a casino. You've got prediction markets and gambling sites that allow you to bet on anything. People everywhere are ensconced in their own algorithmically tailored realities. Social media is warping our perception of the world around us and artificial intelligence threatens to remake it entirely. You've got politicians behaving like influencers. The president posts AI slop to his own personal social network and it's treated like an official White House communication. Our discourse is clearly broken. We're all talking to each other and nobody's doing any listening.

• 0:43Charlie Warzel?

  Our feeds have become windows to this world of conspiracy theories and delightful memes and actual atrocities and they all just congeal together into this disorienting blob on our timelines. If you stay online long enough, it's easy to get a sense that the world is simultaneously ending and that everyone's indifferent to that fact. It all feels ridiculous and unmooring. And so Galaxy Brain wants to be a grounding force, a space for conversations, explanations, and tangents that anchor you to reality, however strange it may be, and to try to help you understand respectfully what the hell is going on. You can catch Galaxy Brain on YouTube or subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:28Charlie Warzel?

  Our first episode drops November 14th. See you on the internet.