The Internet’s Let-It-Rip Era, With The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel

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He's one of the smartest observers I know about media and tech and their intersection, a perfect channels guest. In the past, I would describe Charlie as one of the smartest writers I know, and that is still true. But now Charlie is podcasting. Welcome, Charlie. So I needed a broader term. And in fact, we're going to spend a lot of time talking about podcasting on this one. How it has become increasingly a video product and why it has become that. And how Charlie, well into a distinguished career as a writer and reporter, is now turning himself into a YouTuber too. Also discussed here why meme stocks like GameStop didn't go away, why it matters or doesn't if we live in a world dominated by AI slop, and why Twitter became an entirely new thing but defied predictions from some people that it would disappear. Okay, here we go. Here's me talking to The Atlantic's Charlie Warzell. I'm here with The Atlantic's Charlie Warzell. Welcome back, Charlie. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. You are a prolific writer and now podcaster at The Atlantic. Galaxy Brain is where to go find all Charlie's great stuff. I want to talk to you about stuff you've been writing about and podcasting about. But before we get there, there's news that strikes me as a very Charlie Warzel story, which is GameStop trying to buy eBay. I know you don't cover a lot of straight business news, but this is not a straight business news story. This is a meme stock story. The reason that GameStop exists today at all is because it was the poster boy for the meme stock craze of the pandemic. And even though the stock has cratered from the crazy heights it went to, it's still way above where it was prior to it become a meme stock, darling. And they also took their shares, their high-priced shares, and turned them into cash so they can plausibly, I don't know if they can actually buy eBay, but they can at least make a plausible argument that they could buy eBay. And GameStop, the company, has done a little better than people had expected, but it's still not a high-flying company. It's not the kind of company you would think could buy eBay. Long windup. What is the fact that a meme stock company has at least a plausible chance of buying eBay in 2026? Tell us about the world. I have been thinking a lot about the irrationality of the stock market, especially in the Trump era, Trump too. And, you know, I think one of the most interesting phenomena has been the war in Iran, the oil shocks, all the experts who know anything about global supply and oil and everything basically sounding the alarm bell. Like doing the kind of January, there's a virus in China thing for the global energy supply, right? It's coming for us. You have no idea how bad this could get and is going to get. And frankly, it's going to something has to give. And then Donald Trump goes on true social and it's like, I'm going to reopen that straight. And then the stock market rallies knowing like full well that like he hasn't done anything to to make that happen. It's just sort of like, you know, wishful film and wishful thinking. and the the irrationality of that also the irrationality a little bit of of you know the the ai investment and worrying about that and and i i have this this it feels to me like everyone has sort of internalized this lesson from really like donald trump's behavior i feel like and the first lesson of that was just that shamelessness is a superpower right never apologize do whatever you want to do don't there's nothing you can't come back from right there's no pr crisis anymore really right like just double down find the people who are willing to defend you play to them and you know an information war is good business almost and i feel like another lesson like sort of a downstream lesson of of that is if you build the narrative, the narrative can either become reality or it can be stronger than reality. And that's what I feel like is happening with a lot of things. I haven't really looked a ton into, you know, the GameStop eBay situation, but I feel like to some degree, you know, if you can trot out the narrative, if you can get people to respond to it, if you can get people to treat it seriously or even in not treating it seriously, you know do what we're doing here which is like turn the situation over right try to analyze like what you know chance does GameStop have to actually do this can they pull this off what does it mean it's it's making them you know a really relevant character in this conversation it's making them talk about making people talk about you know the the power of the meme the meme stock the narrative getting people bought in maybe there's another you know chance for them to you know, go on a, go on a Reddit run, right. Where, where people are like, yeah, we do want this to happen. This is so outrageous. We would like to, you know, find a way to, to propel them towards that. I, I think in, in that sense, there is this way in which the narrative is totally eaten reality. And we are, we are watching a lot of people grasp and try to basically take advantage of that moment where, where nothing is true and everything is possible. And there's reality and there's sort of financial reality, right? Which is you only have to be right today or, you know, in really in microseconds to write to profit from you being right. You don't have to be right long term. You don't even have to be right in the physical world. You just have to find someone else to take the other side of that trade. Right. Like the Trump, the Trump company with the SPAC and all that. Right. So that that is that is collapsed, but it's still worth billions and billions of dollars. And in theory, some people are holding that stock because they like Donald Trump. Other people like it because they like the idea of the pivot they've announced to becoming a nuclear. I always confuse the two fusion or fission company. And again, none of it has to be right at all. It just has to be right long enough for you to sell your shares to somebody else. And maybe that is the lesson. It's possible. Well, you see it too, the Allbirds pivot, right? The sort of selling off the actual shoe company and then pivoting to the thing. And the stock totally, you know, it rises off the backs of the idea that they're just going to lease out their stuff to data centers or pivot and, you know, take their infrastructure and turn it into whatever. And that, you know, felt both outrageous and at the same time, like, I don't know, maybe I think something has broken in society. That one does even have a tiny bit of logic to it because there are people taking old real estate and turning it into data centers. I just saw when I was in Minneapolis a few months ago, it's called the Sleep Number headquarters, the Sleep Number building, but it's where they actually make the Sleep Number beds. And they're selling that at a huge, huge markup because apparently it can be a data center. And the suggestion was maybe this will be what happens to lots of downtowns as they'll take their old unused office buildings and turn them into data centers. That's very dystopian, but at least it works in the moment. Yeah, we know what to do with malls now, right? Let's keep talking about AI. You have been you write about Internet culture. What AI does to the Internet culture is obviously a core concern for you. you've been writing about, about a slop and veracity. And I think they're, I don't know if they're two sides of the same coin, but they're related, right? There's, did it, did a robot make this? Did a human make this or a robot make it? And do we care? I guess is the, is the second part of it. And I think you approach all these discussions from the idea, like, obviously we need to know if a human made this, obviously we should know that. And kind of be, kind of to be a devil's advocate, but kind of, cause maybe I think it, I wonder if, if we don't need to know that in lots of cases, there's cases where it obviously matters whether the thing is true or not. And, or if someone is representing themselves and it's actually a robot doing it, that there, you could imagine circumstances where Donald Trump or a fake Donald Trump shows up and it really matters which one is real. But in a lot of cases, I would argue, maybe it doesn't matter if, if, if, uh, the head of sales at X company had, had chat GPT write his LinkedIn post? Do we care? Well, I would say that it's dependent on the situation, right? I had a chat with Max Spiro recently on my podcast, who was one of the co-founders of Pangram, which is the AI detection software that some people believe is the gold standard. Other people think all of AI detection is kind of bogus. But he is very obviously interested and and committed to trying to tease out this question, figure out what's what. He built this browser extension that lets you look through any Reddit or LinkedIn or X post or Substack or whatever and try to identify. And it goes through my head in that moment. It's like, oh, this is going to just trigger this witch hunt, right? Where it's just like people are just going through everything. Oh, that's already started. Well, it has. It has. But not everyone has access to the tools, and not everyone's thinking about it in this moment. I will tell you based on my kids high school experience, which is whenever something weird gets published or distributed or someone who is in disfavor, write something. I'm thinking of a specific person in this case as a memo. And some people say, well, that must be A.I. because it doesn't make any sense. And then the kids themselves are putting their homework through A.I. checkers. Presumably they're not using A.I. to do the homework. But the A.I. checker says you've there's A.I. in here. The kids then go and redo their work to make it less likely to trigger the AI. Mostly means taking out M dashes. But anyway, the point is that in certain parts of the world, people are already quick to say that's AI if they don't like something. And they're quick to worry that their work will be found as AI. Yeah, I think that's that's obviously totally correct. And anyway, so he's very invested in this. And, you know, I kind of posed a similar question to him of, does this really, like, at what point does it stop mattering because it's just, there's so much out there and it's just so difficult to tell in this process, right? And I think he broke it down a little bit to say, it seems like we're probably going to be living in a world where there is a lot of the writing that comes out of, you know, that's not like, you know, stuff from professional writers, but it's stuff that, you know, comes out of marketing material. or again, LinkedIn CEO speak or whatever kind of thought leader stuff posts on social networks, that it's all going to be like AI assisted to some degree, right? That people are going to either write the thing themselves or come up with part of it. It's sort of human generated ideas that then get fed through because it's just quicker and more efficient. And these are sort of low stakes things anyway. And that future seems plausible to me. What he really is against, and the thing that I think is, I'm pretty much against, is this like whole cloth creation of, you know, like minimal, minimal, I kind of don't even care effort in order to put out this slop. So this is what I would say is like, you know, the AI SEO farm scam sort of like websites that like exist to prop up a certain topic to, you know, do whatever is left of like banner ad click arbitrage. Where it's just like, I'm going to flood the zone with like the 10 best smoke detectors, blah, blah, blah. And it's like AI slop lorem ipsum. It drowns out the people who actually go out and try to, you know, tell you what is the best smoke detector. Because in a pinch, you want a smoke detector that's not going to malfunction or whatever. And that it seems like, you know, a really relevant, like, we should care about the slop when it is like choking out the usefulness of the Internet, the utility of the Internet, which is to connect people with information that is like good and that you can vet in anywhere. And the other is, is this like making stuff up out of whole cloth in like the laziest way. So like, I think a LinkedIn thread from a CEO where they're like, yeah, you know, I ran it through chat GPT or whatever, like very, who cares? But I think the people who are building like hustle porn, you know, posts that are like how to optimize A, B and C that is just sort of like you put in a prompt to chat GPT. Like, how can I get, you know, 45 people to sign up for my class plan? You know, I want eight 85 different tweets with, you know, 18 bulleted lists of whatever. And I think like when people are putting in that like that minimal amount of effort to sort of either scam people or hustle people out of, you know, their money or, you know, basically try to like build a business in an hour type thing. I think that that is really just like generally shitty as a as an experience and a little bit like poisonous. And I think I think that is the type of stuff which then can be obviously transferred over into, you know, politics. Right. Where it's like, how do I how do I build like a very, you know, Claude, build me a very effective propaganda campaign against AI data centers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So we except everything you describing to me sounds like an acceleration of stuff we already had right We had Macedonian people making fake posts in the 2016 election right And Google has been a shitty place to find all kinds of product stuff for a long time because there a lot of value in jamming up the search results with shitty product stuff and you would have thought i would have thought over the years google would have done something about even before we were worried about ai stuff clogging up the feed that google would take would be more careful about pruning that and periodically you'll hear they've made some announcement about the stuff and they're cleaning it up but it's still full of it um and when the ai boom kicked off in 2023 i was talking to neil mohan at youtube about this because it seemed obvious to me that they'd be flooded with crummy content. And I don't know what his real answer is, but the one he kept giving me, because I asked him about it repeatedly, was basically, if people like it, we'll elevate it. And it doesn't really matter if it's AI generated or not. And if they don't like it, it also doesn't matter if it's AI generated or not. Again, I don't know what he really thinks, but there is some logic to it, right? Which is if people like the crap, we'll give them the crap. That's what we're in the business of doing. And I always, this is kind of a fundamental tension of the internet, right? Which is, do people actually want what they're getting? Or are the platforms incented to give them a certain kind of thing that the platform is like or that solves a short term answer for the platforms and doesn't solve the long term, very obvious problems? I think this is definitely an outgrowth of the platform stepping away from any kind of editorial role. right like this is like this has been fully realized since you know late 2024 where all these platforms like oh you know thank thank god i don't have to we never want to begin with any of this yeah we didn't want to do this to begin with this is so like i i really think part of and i've written about this part of like this symbiotic relationship with donald trump there's a lot of reasons right but one of them is like the companies themselves don't want to have to go through the hassle of setting these standards and having to deal with the shifting cultural values and norms. They'd much rather just let it rip. It's so much easier for them. It's more lucrative in a lot of senses for them to just let it rip and let people put whatever they want. And there was ideology with it. I don't mean left-right ideology. I mean, we should not be in the position of telling people what they like. That's the great thing about building these software systems is the people will tell us what they like. Yeah. And also it just blows up in their face a lot easier. Like, you know, that's how you get dragged in front of Congress is when you start moderating things. You don't get dragged in front of Congress as much, maybe, you know, in a different administration, who knows. But if you just sort of say like, we're letting the people decide. Anyway, I think that that, you know, that's very much the ethos of the moment. I don't know that that's going to be like the way that we decide we want to do internet for forever on these platforms. Like I could conceivably see a tipping point of like, man, we did let it rip during the sort of period of the AI boom where everything just got flooded. And now we are dealing with this Wild West. Like we actually do need to clean it up. Right. It's sort of like a industrial revolution to like, OK, now the skies of London are black and choked with smoke. It was not an unforeseeable consequence. It was something that we could track, but yet we did it anyway. Yeah. And so I think you have a little of that. I also just got to believe that it's fundamentally, I think, and I'm not a platform executive, obviously, but it's fundamentally a little strange to me to build a company with thought and care. and, you know, wanting to be, you know, YouTube is like the destination for like news information content. It's like the, in some senses, it almost is the internet now, right? Like it is where so many people are going for everything. To build that out, to care about it and then just be like, whatever shit people want to watch, like we'll feed you like, you know, come here piggy, it's the slot bucket. You know, it's like, that's an odd like way to approach a business. You'd think you'd want to say like, no, actually, what we want to do is we, you know, we don't care as much about ideological content. We're sort of an equal opportunity provider. But like we do care about quality. And I think that that's if you pose it to them in terms of quality, I don't know. It's just a very odd thing of if the people like it, we're going to give it to them. They'll tell you they like quality when they're pitching in front of advertisers and they want to tell blue blue chip advertisers that we're making great stuff here that you can feel comfortable having your ads against. I do think that there is a long seated thing and it's not a Trump era thing. I think it really, really it goes all the way back to the beginning of the platform. So they said these are inherently better than East Coast establishment institutions that tell us what we should think and shoot. Now, this is obviously when we thought if we let people if we let people to their own devices, stuff, good stuff would come out. This is the 2008, 2010 era. So it's easier to be comfortable with this. But it was it was pretty deep seated. And I think that has remained. To be fair, a lot of good stuff does come out. I think a lot of people are consuming low quality garbage. Sure. And that is, you know, people were consuming low quality garbage before the large language models. My hopeful vision is that this period of honestly kind of a little bit of like lawlessness in terms of how we govern the internet, what we're doing, let it rip that era. I do think these things sway back or, you know, move back and forth. They boomerang back and forth. And I do think that there's a feeling among just normal people of not loving being surprised by something that you thought was real and it turns out to be fake. kind of exhaustion in that way an idea of of of wanting things that are made for humans by humans or or just you know i think ai does not poll very well like people say they don't like ai content and i i can see a period of time where things a lot of the platforms decide that it's in their best business interest to actually separate this stuff right i i think i think certain platforms are already saying it's so hard for us to identify slop, but we can identify verifiable humans who are making good stuff and we can put a badge on them. I can see a world in which we do swing a little bit more towards prioritizing that stuff because that is actually what people are going to yearn for. They're going to desire that. And maybe the middle ground is kind of the market solution we already have, which is If you want good stuff, however you define good made by humans or, you know, farm to table restaurants or whatever artisan made goods, you can go get those things. You'll pay a premium for them. You probably have to be in a specific demographic group to even know they exist slash afford them. You can go get them and everyone else can get the free shitty shit. And they can kind of know that's what they're getting. And some people won't know or and or care. Can I give you one more thing on that? I think a big problem on the internet, especially a problem that people like you and I who are trying to write, report and comment on all this stuff is that nobody really knows what everyone else is actually seeing. And there's all sorts of metrics out there that suggest that people are viewing whatever. But view metrics online are historically pretty shoddy, you know, so on places like X, you know, it's very difficult to tell what constitutes as a quote unquote view. And now you can see them on all the videos and all the tweets and the live streams and everything. And I think sometimes when you're analyzing this information landscape and you see 12 million views on a piece of like AI generated garbage that just, you know, is like quote tweeted everywhere and then, you know, screenshot it and put on Instagram and all these types of, you know, like viral pieces of content that are mostly like rage bait or slop or whatever. there's this way of saying like this is the dominant culture this is the thing that people are consuming and the reality is they're swiping by it and they're pausing on it for two seconds so they're you know quote tweeting it and then saying like this sucks and then forgetting about it completely and i think there's this idea with a lot of this this stuff is like oh everyone is consuming they love the slop they love this and it's like what does love this really mean i think so much of the consumption is so passive that it's tough to assign this value of like, no, this is like the fans are crying out for this when it's like, this isn't really actually popular. It's just popular in the sense that like it glanced by someone's feed a lot. We'll be right back with Charlie Warzel, but first a word from a sponsor. I'm Maria Sharapova, and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Follow Pretty Tough wherever you get your podcasts. So we are 250 years into this American experiment, and I'd say it's going okay. I'd give us like a C+. There is no perfect past, but there is also no exclusively negative past. Because humans are gonna human, that's what we do. I think the story of America is the struggle of people who have not been included in the promise of America to expand those principles to include more people. What's going to determine the next 250 years of America? And how do we write a new social contract that can give us the democracy we deserve? Okay, so I'm just going to be a jerk here because I'm a historian. So we have to have a prologue explaining, you know, we the people. Okay. You know, I do still remember it from Schoolhouse Rock. We the people, anointed the former Warpherstic Union, established justice. What is it? Ensure domestic tranquility? So you're talking about a foundational document. So I'm building a document that will protect American democracy. That's this week on America Actually. Hey, I'm Matt Buchel, comedian, writer, and floating head you may or may not have seen on your FYP. And I'm starting a brand new podcast. Wait, don't swipe away. It's called That Sounds Like a Lot. I'm going to start by breaking down whatever insanity is happening in the world. And then I'll sit down with a comedian or actor or writer or honestly, anyone who responds to my DMs. This is not the place to get the news, but it is a place to feel a little bit better about it. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcast. That Sounds Like A Lot, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. And we're back. You are now making a video podcast. I am the last podcaster not to be on video yet. And one of the things you always hear about the reason we should do video podcasts is because people love to consume video podcasts and the numbers bear it out. Look at YouTube. Look at these huge numbers. I'm sure there are people who are watching this stuff, but I don't. I don't. I haven't done a full survey of literally everyone I know, but I feel like the people in my life, they're not podcast video consumers. We think there's a real audience, but how big is that audience for people who want to watch people talk on YouTube? Well, I think there's a lot of people. Again, I'm going to go somewhat anecdotally here, but there are lots of folks who are younger. And by younger, I mean like millennial and down who are opening up. They have a pretty finely tuned YouTube algorithm for them. They've got the people that they know they like. And they're opening up the little like podcast tab on YouTube and they're letting it play in the background of their day. The first episode we did of our video podcast was with Hank Green, the sort of famous YouTuber. And I had an acquaintance of mine who I was just talking to. And they were like, oh, dude, yesterday I was just sitting there working. And all of a sudden I heard your voice and I wasn't really even listening to the podcast that was in my feed. But I just clicked over to the YouTube tab and there you were talking to him. And it's, you know, it got recommended to him because he watches every single Hank Green video in the background, right? Of, well, he's just doing his job, working, doing whatever. So I think there's a lot of ambient watching. I've heard that suggestion brought up. At the same time, YouTube will say, listen, more than half our consumption now is coming from televisions, suggesting that people are sitting on the couch and choosing to watch this stuff. And again, I can imagine you choosing to watch lots of YouTube videos on a big screen, but watching you and me talk, I can sort of imagine it, but it doesn't really sync up. And I see a ton of video podcast content, but it is all clips in my TikTok feed or my Instagram feed. And I see a ton of it. I can tell you what Megan Kelly was talking about recently and six months ago. But it never compels me to go watch the actual podcast, which I think is also, from what I can tell, statistically true that people aren't. The idea of you're discovering a podcast on TikTok or Instagram and clip form and moving to the main thing does not happen that much. They seem to be different vectors. Yeah. I spoke to Ed Elson, who is a podcaster himself. He wrote recently about this idea that, you know, the clips are actually the real product here, not the podcasts, especially when it comes to like streamers, live streamers, you know. Hassan Biker. Yeah, the face smashing guy, Clavicular. But one that I thought was really interesting is the podcast or the live stream show, TBPN, which is the technology show. I think you had them on your podcast once before. that got bought by open ai for an undisclosed but you know pretty large sum uh he did like a an analysis of just you know 10 of the tbpn videos and clips and uh saw that the the live views of the show on x tbpn it's about like averaging about 7 000 views whereas the clips were averaging like well over 250 000 views right that the clips are are the product that are the thing they're making the show in some senses for the people who do want to watch it, but knowing that it's a small core audience that, you know, they can engage with, they can throw the ads up, you know, they can do that. But the real sort of like game there is to have the clips identify these best moments, advertise around the clips, make money off of that. And basically this idea that like, you know, you are playing for that casual audience, that glancing audience, because that's kind of how all this works. And I do think that there's a lot of truth to that. I don love it at all but I think that there there a way in which these really longer form podcasts or video things what they ultimately doing is is waiting to find the moments that are the best you know to strike and then those moments can go viral and yes you can recruit some portion of that to new audience a very you know minuscule part but a big part of it is like you're trying to become popular in the clip realm i mean look i i started watching chernobyl the HBO series about Chernobyl, not an upper great show, because I was seeing clips of it on TikTok. So it can it can convert you. You know, the remaining late night talk shows are all built basically for Internet distribution and clips, which is why I think SNL has had a bit of a renaissance is that it's so clip friendly. It's consume it all in two minutes. How is what's your experience like going from serious guy writing to serious guy making podcasts? How does it change what you talk about, how you think about it? Okay. The real reason I wanted to do this and do it as a video podcast was not really just because that's where everything was moving. Even though that's, you know, that it's helpful. The reason I wanted to do it was because I write about these platforms forever. And I have always found, it was sort of a lesson. I was at, uh, I was at BuzzFeed for like seven years. And what I always really loved about working there and the ethos of the place was like, we are covering this thing while living it, right? We are writing about the rise of these platforms and virality and the way that it's shaping, you know, culture and politics and all this stuff. But we also have to live this. We have to play around with these platforms. We have to find ways to recruit audience, see what works. And that is going to generally inform the work that we do writing about this stuff, especially covering technology there. And there's a little bit of that in this, right? YouTube is this incredible engine for content, but also has, as we've seen now, like so many downstream effects in the way our politics work, the way that, you know, just broadly like culture works. And so I wanted it's a platform that I don't I spend time consuming, but I never spend any time as a creator. I don't know what the incentives actually are. I don't know how it works to grow audience. I had no idea if I put this stuff up about, you know, things that I find interesting, whether it's going to, you know, do really well or do really poorly. Right. Because I come with a writer's sensibility. And I think that I found that it's it's a completely different animal, which which is not super surprising. But I think like there's there are all these ways in that that YouTube works as a creator that I have found really fascinating. The Atlantic has a very large YouTube channel. Right. The Atlantic was early to YouTube. So there's this huge base of people and a lot of them are coming for a very specific type of thing. Right. A very specific kind of conversation about democracy and politics in this way. Again, this is just anecdotal from my experience. I think they're coming for people who are a little more established, a little bit more distinguished in their careers than like me, the guy with a beard who's just like yammering about, you know, clips and tick, let alone a Mr. Beast. Right. And so there's this way in which I feel like we have this this group. And yet I have to sort of endear myself to that audience of our subscribers. And if I don't successfully do that at the outset of a video, right, if the video doesn't immediately sort of grab that group of people, it's going to be less likely to get thrown out into the broader pool of like people who don't subscribe to the channel. Right. So there's this way in which I can see that other people who are creators may be getting like audience captured very, very early. Right. It's like you develop a reputation. And this is similar to a lot of other places, but you develop a reputation. and people subscribe to you and they want a very specific product. And if you don't give them that product, YouTube sees and identifies that and says, okay, that's not their best work. So, you know, we'll send it out to the rest of the world, but not in the same way that we would if you are lighting your subscriber base on fire and they're like, yes, this is amazing. We love this. YouTube's like, okay, let's get a bigger audience to this and see how it goes. In your mind, you're making content for the Atlantic's core audience first. And that's the only way you have a hope of getting to a larger audience. Right. So but if that's the case. So in my mind, the things that work best on YouTube are very on Atlantic like things right there. I mean, if you just look at the most popular things on YouTube, they're nothing like what you consume from the Atlantic down to the aesthetics. Right. We were talking before we started recording about the YouTube face, which is what you see in all the thumbnails of all the top. Yeah, it looks like you're in distress. You've been shocked or maybe you were on a toilet or something like something is going wrong. And those are the face and they're very unflattering faces. And all of the top YouTube people choose those faces to represent themselves. You don't on your YouTube thumbnails. I was looking at that. I'm assuming that is some aesthetic choice for you, but maybe it's also a choice that, you know, my core Atlantic reader viewer doesn't want that, isn't going to respond to that. Again, long winded way of saying, is there a world where what works for a YouTube for an Atlantic consumer is so radically different than what works for the rest of YouTube that you're going to constantly sort of be bumping into that limit? Well, I think for me personally in this experiment, I would say first off that like my North Star in making this show with our great team is just doing stuff that we think is interesting and that is quality. And ideally, you know, the sweet spot, the things that have worked the best for us have always been, and it's obviously no surprise, it's stuff that someone who's very versed in a piece of technology or a piece of internet culture can find something new and interesting to latch onto, but also someone who's coming to this cold can find. So something that can work on a number of different audience levels. I don't think that the content that is popular on YouTube necessarily is at odds always with what a legacy media organization, like, say, The Atlantic, with the standards and the practices that we have. I don't think it's at odds always because I also think the largest growth sector for YouTube over the last year or, you know, last bit, I should say, is boomers, is older people are coming into this. A lot of people who are, you know, maybe now just being retired, there is a bit of like a cable news replacement situation happening where like MSNBC, Fox, CNN, they were on, you know, the TV kind of going along all day in the background. Now it's autoplay videos from these people on YouTube. You know, like I have found that, you know, I get a lot of feedback and that's definitely like a big component of people who are watching. And those people are Atlantic subscribers and time subscribers. And, you know, obviously, this is a whole slew of this on the other side of the ideological spectrum, too. So that that crew is not coming from Mr. Beast style thumbnails. Right. And YouTube is big enough to contain that and serve that up to them. Yeah. But but in terms of the thumbnail thing, I mean, this is part of the experiment. Right. Like we have changed the thumbnails slightly. We've gone from, I think, like a black and white stylized to, you know, another thing. These subtle things really do change it. And I think to go out a little beyond just my experience, somebody who I've talked to some about all of this, about how do you break in to try to do journalism on YouTube in a way that is both native to the format, but also taking some of the best from it. No one, I think, out there is doing it better than Pablo Torre, who is doing investigative stories, but also doing, by his own admission, more lower brow, just sort of like culture, pop culture stuff. Deep, deep dives into Bill Belichick and his young girlfriend. Right. Stuff like that. But if you look at his thumbnails, I actually was talking to somebody about this the other day. They're like a perfect hybrid of like mine and Mr. Beasts, right? Like it's not scammy. It's not, you know, it's not like, hey, fellow kids, you know, like trying to be someone that he isn't. But there is also usually like something going on. People are making animated faces. There is sort of a, you know, a thumbnail that is, you know, enticing in that way. And I think that that's, you know, we will eventually probably settle on a way to merge those forms and find the thing that works well. Is making video changing your thinking and or reporting? Are you more likely to pursue something because you think, oh, that would be a good video one day or this topic I'm really interested in? I cannot imagine how we have an interesting conversation about it on YouTube. So maybe we won't do it. Or even if you don't reach those conclusions, are they are they in the back of your head? I think something that's hard is is that is bummed me out is guest selection in the sense of if you have somebody who is a stone cold expert, really great, knows everything. Is not somebody who like who presents like sometimes you'll have experts who present is like kind of anxious. They don't want to be in front of the camera. They don't like they don't like that. They're not excellent communicators in a YouTube and video centric way. There's a way in which that can can hurt. And you don't get that in audio. But you put them in front of the camera and they freeze up. And this has always been an issue. You know, I did do podcasts and conferences. What kind of person is good on stage? Right. There's a lot of people who are interesting and smart and accomplished, but they might not be dynamic on stage or they might have a heavy accent, which makes it difficult to listen to for our audience. And even though you try to counterweight against that, that affects who you program for. And I'm sure it's even more so for video. Yeah. But broadly speaking, I do think because people are, you know, you don't know how exactly they're consuming this, whether it is like third screen, right? Like it's just like on in the background. Like I don't think a ton about we have a producer for my show, this woman, Renee Klar, who is really like understands and consumes a lot of YouTube herself. And she's like so good at accenting these interviews with charts and clips and, you know, and other elements that I think really do add to the overall experience and make them kind of sing as video. But also I am not overly at this point as I'm trying to like if I'm doing it straight interview, I'm not overly worried about like, you know, OK, is this, you know, is this subject really great for it? And I find that, you know, some of our wonkier videos that are, you know, aren't necessarily like just me and a Neil Dash talking about, you know, AI and the current AI moment. You know, it was a really great performing video for us. It's just two dudes talking about AI, but it found a really good portion of the Atlantic's audience and then also just like, you know, went wide and found a good portion of people there. And I think that's just because it was a good conversation where, you know, we got someplace new. I'll be right back, but first a word from a sponsor. Elon Musk spent most of this week sitting in a courtroom litigating some of the most important moments in the early history of the AI revolution. He didn't do a great job, and the ways in which he didn't do a great job may come back to haunt Elon Musk in a pretty big way. This week on The Vergecast, we're talking about what's going on in Musk versus OpenAI and how it might affect the rest of the tech industry. Plus, the most exciting laptop we've seen in a while and maybe the most exciting game controller we've seen in a while. All that on The Vergecast, wherever you get podcasts. And we're back. Let's keep talking about you, Charlie Wurzel. So, as you mentioned, you were at BuzzFeed, then you went to New York Times, then you really had a great job, I thought, at the Times doing really cool opinion stuff, cool reporting projects, tons of prestige. And you said, I'm going to go do Substack. And I don't think you were on Substack more than a year before you went to the Atlantic. Maybe it was a year, you tell me. It was like nine months, yeah. Okay, there you go. I often on this podcast talk to solo proprietors and Substackers and people who are increasingly successful on their own. And then the other half of my podcast is talking to people who run media companies and often and they want to hire those people or somehow participate in that. And they are kind of stuck. They can't figure out how they could work with an Emily Sundberg, for instance, like, you know, could what could they pay her more than what she's already making? What could they offer her that she already doesn't have? So you've now been on both sides of that fence. how do you think about it from a solo proprietor's perspective and how would you if you were running a legacy media organization was trying to work with these folks how would you think about that the way that i see it or the way that i've experienced it over the last five years or actually longer than that i guess now is that as a person who's making the content right who is doing the journalism whatever i i am perpetually struck by the feeling that the grass is always greener like wherever you are right like i'm always having fomo about something you know i watch certain people who are independent creators responding to news moments in this real multi-platform way like so quickly just i've got some thoughts boom here they are they're you know perhaps they're disorganized who cares like the best stuff will find its audience what matters is being in this part of the conversation as quick as humanly possible. And I think that that's really helpful, right? And that the business of quality control, which is also really important, that, you know, institutions like the Atlantic or the Times or wherever, you know, that means it's harder to be as responsive. In terms of like how to work with, like how there can be more of a fusion of this, I don't know the economics are so weird for creators because I've thought about this myself the thing that I didn't personally like about Substack I actually really loved the freedom, I loved the one-to-one with an audience I loved all the different sort of like the YouTube stuff, like learning from every single thing that you do because you the only one who has you have the god mode visibility to how your you know your your stuff performs i i love that but i did not like just being alone you know i love bouncing ideas off people i love collaboration i love writing stories with other people um i think that that is how i tend to work best and there was a point in the substack universe where you know i was growing my thing and it was like well you know could i invite another writer who's great into this thing right and could we do this together and it's like well obviously you'd want somebody who does something sort of similar right like i don't want to just like get somebody who writes about you know ballet or something like just i want i want some cohesion which means that we have similar audiences already probably so you're probably if you add them into your media company You split everything 50-50, so you're taking a 50% pay cut. And then you're like, so what is the recruitment on that? Well, if I bring in somebody who's doing tech journalism stuff, chances are it's not one-to-one, but the ability to grow your audience isn't quite as much. Now, you could make the case that that means we'll double how good the work is, the value for a subscription will go up, and therefore, we should be able to do it. I think, though, that it's a bummer, because if I could have found someone, I may have stayed on, but the economics did not work for me at all in that, and I love the collaboration that you get. you had um you had joe weisenthal from odd lots on and you kind of talked a little bit about this whole joe why don't you leave bloomberg and go off on your own yeah and and i think i honestly think what what bloomberg has done with odd lots is a really excellent example of how they're like it's a good template because that is a show that if you just you know if you're describing it to somebody and they have no context, you might be like, who's the audience for that? Right? Like it might not totally make sense. And then when you look at the way that they are treated inside the Bloomberg ecosystem, it's just like, do whatever it is that you want to do. Right? Write your newsletter as many times a week as you want to do. If it's a crisis, put out seven podcast episodes in eight days or just two a week. Like, you know, it doesn't matter what days, it doesn't matter what. And it's very much like we have these people who have genuine interests, who really care about this stuff, who are like lit on fire in these moments, and we're going to empower them to just do their thing. And I think that that's what's really hard inside, you know, establishment institutions. There's just natural bureaucracy, right? think places bureaucracy and and even beyond the money part right because let's let's assume that bloomberg is giving joe and tracy a gazillion dollars which they deserve um inevitably if you have a joe and and tracy off in one part of the the the organization doing basically whatever they want you then have a bunch of other people who don't have those that freedom and they're like well, why can't I do that? And how come so and so? And that is a tension. Again, I used to work with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. That was a thing at the journal. And even when they split off from the journal, there was still a lot of animosity within the greater Dow Jones universe about why those people got those special privileges. So I can imagine lots of executives not wanting to deal with that tension. Yeah. No, I think that that's true. But also, So I think the way that if I were to like advise media executives on this, I would say that there are so many different types of people who do broadly what we call journalistic work, right? There are people who are so great in the moment at contextualizing and analyzing things on the fly, writing the day two story or podcasting the day two story on day one. They just sort of see the matrix. They are great at coming up with the frameworks for that type of thing. Those people usually often can't translate to, I publish one investigative story every 18 months and I get somebody freed from prison or someone sent to prison or, you know, whatever happens because I am so good at working the phones and I see the long thing and I can do that work. And that has, you know, you wouldn't tell that person, I need you to blog every day, right? No, you're a marathon runner, run a marathon. We have a sprinter over here to sprint. Exactly. I think there's a reticence among media executives to see the type of person that is this multi-platform, creator-type individual who plays by their own rules a little bit more, lets it rip, but also in a way that's not discrediting. I'm not talking about a conspiracy substacker or somebody who works within the concepts that we would call respectable journalism. that person is totally different than those those other types they may be a little closer to the day two story on on day one person but they come to the internet with a kind of creative extremely generative a lot of at bats vibe they're very experimental i know that they're establishment folks but i think like joe and tracy and the odd lots people embody that kind of thing. Right. And you have to empower people like that who are just like, I know how to find that perfect blend between, you know, what people want right now and what is good and my own sensibility. And what I'm interested in. And I'm also comfortable being wrong. This thing may be, this thing may look bad in two weeks because our presumptions may have changed. And I think you have to look at them as like a different desk if you want to work with them. And you have to say like, yeah, unfortunately, there are going to be people at the organization who are like, why do they have all the freedom? And I don't. But there's also where I work, you know, there are people who are excellent long form magazine writers who really do only write a couple times a year. And to me, that's totally understandable because they do a thing that I don't do in the same way that I'm not, you know, trained at doing or don't have a lot of experience doing. And I think it's totally normal for there to be these different types of positions and things like that. I think what's just really hard, especially in this moment where, you know, you've got lots of litigious people out in the world. And it's tough, I think, for media executives to let people have that kind of freedom and control. But the whole point of this is that you build this audience by doing something that is really authentic feeling, that is exploring your curiosities in the way you want to do it, how you want to do it, when. And if you try to take that person and then put them in this box, we have so much evidence from the past that it doesn't work that well. These are very wise words, Charlie. And if I was a better podcaster, I'd end there. But I do want to ask you one last question about Twitter. I think you no longer have an account there. As we know, when when Musk bought Twitter in 2022, lots of folks said this is the end of Twitter. It's going to blow up. It has stuck around. It remains a big platform, but it also is radically different. Right. Lots of people like you have left entirely. People like me spend less time there. And I can't think of another online institution that has gone through a change like that. We're used to things, you know, cresting and then falling away, you know, the MySpace, Friendster, whatever. I don't remember anything transforming like this. Can you think of another example? And does it tell us anything about either the specifics of Twitter or the Internet that that remains a big thing this many years into the Musk ownership? I think that Twitter is one of one. I really do. I think it, it just, it captured something. It captured a group of people. And I think I, frankly, the, one of the reasons that it still exists in the way that it does is because there's a number of people who didn't want to give it up, you know, who felt totally like, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm not leaving. I built the audience, but it's also just, it's part of my daily workflow. It's part of what I do. It's a thing that I check. Whether it's an addiction, a compulsion, or just they think it's a good place for them to be. And we should note that when you and I are talking about the demise of Twitter, we're talking about a version of Twitter that we like. But for other people, they never participated in that Twitter. They were into sports Twitter or talking about tech Twitter. And now AI Twitter is a very big thing. And so, I mean, this is actually very interesting because I think it was like last week, honestly, I reposted a couple of things. Like I have spent a long time not tweeting on the platform. You were dormant, but not deactivated. Yeah, I mean, I have to use it in some sense to like monitor that conversation for my work, but didn't post anything. I've had a number of conversations with people in the AI tech world, especially people who are a little bit younger, who are like, I have no idea who you are. And they will go back through my, when I get in touch with them for a story, like a source, and they're like, wow. This stuff's interesting. This is really cool. You have no visibility in my world. I don't read mainstream news stuff unless I see it on Twitter, X, whatever. And so that's cool, but this is the first I'm hearing of you. you know, guy who's been doing this for 17 years. And that's totally fine. I'm not like offended by that or anything, but I've had enough of those interactions with those people who are so heavily in the, you know, the, especially like the AI discourse and stuff on, on X that I'm like, all right, I think I probably need to just like have some kind of like post the Atlantic version of my story presence. Or maybe, you know, there's a lot of conversations that happen in the, you course that I'm like, well, I kind of have a thought about that. And maybe just like injecting myself in there is going to be at least helpful. So like people, we're in the business of getting people to read or think about our stuff. This is what I've been telling myself, why I continue to use Twitter is there's an audience there that I want to reach and be in front of. And I weigh that against my distaste for the person who owns it and a lot of the behavior that's there and I'm like, I don't love that my activity is somehow supporting this and I do it anyway. Right. And so I think I'm in that tortured camp. But I think in terms of why has Twitter not died despite becoming a completely different place, I think that one reason for it is the way that the AI conversation happens on x like it's not the only reason but it is in the same way that politics from like 2009 to like 2022 were just like so powered every single piece of like the news cycle happened first on on twitter it was powered by that or like we're just responding to tweets left and right it's like this conversation is happening and it's not it's not a mass of humanity but in that same way that Twitter was for politics. Scale matters less than who is there and how people identify that as being an important part of the culture. And so I think that as the AI industry becomes so important to everyone's life, because it's changing, it's rewiring parts of our society, our entire economy is dependent on it, all this stuff. You have to pay a little bit of attention to that conversation, whether you like it or not. And not just pay attention, but be in the conversation. Because you could be lurking through that whole thing if you wanted to. But also, because it is so, like, it's a great match of form and function, right? Because the AI development process is happening at Twitter speeds, right? Like, every couple of days, someone comes out with a new foundational model or update to the model. Like, you know, one day everyone's talking about DeepSeq, then everyone's talking about CloudCode. Now everyone's talking about Codex. It's like it's moving so quickly and frenetically that X is a really helpful place for that. But also what X does is it accelerates that conversation. And it's what I have noticed is if you are not monitoring it constantly, you get lost immediately. And so it again, I don't know that any of this is good or right or I don't think it's the way that it should be. Yeah. But it kind of rewards this like extremely online sicko behavior because it's the only way that you can participate and not, you know, show your ass. And I remember having you and Oliver Darcy in studio to talk about Twitter and politics years ago. And I said, oh, I just came back from vacation and I turned Twitter off for the week or whatever it was. And you guys looked at me like I was an alien. Like, how could you possibly be doing your job even on vacation? How could you even like log off for a week? You'd miss everything. And I don't think that that's necessarily good. Right. Like we saw what that did to politics. I think I've seen like I joke a lot, you know, the phrase AI psychosis is about like regular people having problematic relationships with chatbots thinking they're real or whatever. I think that there's like another brand of AI psychosis that's happening on X with all the people in this conversation. Not that like they believe that the technology is useful when it's not. Like I think that conversation should probably be like put to bed. Like it clearly AI is useful for some people. It is transformative for some people. It is transforming lots of culture and the economy at the moment. But I think that the way in which the conversation happens, right? Like you have people talking about, you know, like having their open claw remind them to drink water and, you know, tapping into the cameras on their in their home to say, hey, you haven't been in the kitchen lately. Like there's people who are like building this like sci-fi dystopian weirdness future for themselves. And there's other people who are like hunting and pecking onto, you know, chat GPT about what's the best smoke detector, right? Like there's this huge gulf. And I think that Silicon Valley and the AI conversation on X is accelerating such that it's isolating those people a little bit from all the other people who are interacting with their products as normal folks. And I think it's ultimately like, as we saw from politics, it's not good, right? It's not good to be so high on your own supply. Yeah, this seems like an argument for everyone to get off Twitter, but they're not going to. And so, you know, I'll continue to have my tortured relationship with the platform. All right. I guess you can find Charlie Warzell on Twitter. Oh, God. Jeez. But the best way to consume him is to go to The Atlantic, go to find his YouTube videos. He's excellent. Thank you for coming on, Charlie. Thanks for having me. Thanks again to Charlie Warzell. Love having him on the show. Thanks to Charlotte Silver, who produces and edits this show. Thanks to our sponsors, who bring it to you for free. Thanks to you guys for listening. See you soon. www.ad的人store.com