Galaxy Brain

In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel confronts the growing crisis around AI-generated sexual abuse and the culture of impunity enabling it. He examines how Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok is being used to create and circulate nonconsensual sexualized images, often targeting women. Warzel lays out why this moment represents a red line for the internet: It is a test of whether society will toler...

In this episode of “Galaxy Brain,” Charlie Warzel discusses the nightmare playing out on Elon Musk’s X: Grok, the platform’s embedded AI chatbot, is being used to generate and spread nonconsensual sexualized images—often through “undressing” prompts that turn harassment into a viral game. Warzel describes how what once lived on the internet’s fringes has been supercharged by X’s distribution machi...

In this episode of “Galaxy Brain,” Charlie Warzel opens with 5 predictions for 2026. Then, Charlie is joined by his Atlantic colleague David Frum, a staff writer and the host of The David Frum Show podcast, to discuss the temptations that come with launching a new podcast and the challenge of serving an audience that often rewards extreme content. Together, they talk about the responsibility that...

Are your parents addicted to their phone? In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel explores how technology is affecting an older generation of adults. Instead of a phone-based childhood, Warzel suggests, we may be witnessing the emergence of a phone-based retirement—one shaped by isolation, algorithmic feeds, and platforms never designed with aging users in mind. To untangle whether this is...

Late on the Friday before Christmas—just hours before a deadline mandated by Congress, the Department of Justice released part of the trove of documents known colloquially as the Epstein files. The contents are, at different times, unnerving, enraging, banal, and heavily redacted.  At The Atlantic, we’ve been up, poring over the documents to contextualize what they mean. In this special Galaxy Bra...

In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel explores the burgeoning industry of prediction markets. These platforms let people wager on everything from elections and award shows to the most trivial internet ephemera, framing bets as tradable “shares” that rise and fall like stocks. With billions in weekly trading volume, massive new funding rounds, and even a CNN partnership with the predictio...

In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel turns the camera on himself to ask a simple question: Why are you seeing his face?  Using YouTube’s takeover of podcasts as a starting point, he explores how video has devoured audio and turned podcasts into something closer to daytime TV and late-night talk shows. NPR’s Rachel Martin, host of the celebrity-interview show Wild Card, joins to talk abo...

In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel explores the strange, unsettling relationships some people are having with AI chatbots, as well as what happens when those relationships go off the rails. His guest is Kashmir Hill, a technology reporter at The New York Times who has spent the past year documenting what is informally called “AI psychosis.” These are long, intense conversations with s...

In this episode of “Galaxy Brain,” Charlie Warzel sits down with Eliot Higgins, founder of the open-source investigative collective Bellingcat, to examine how our public sphere slid from healthy debate into what Higgins calls “disordered discourse.” Higgins is an early-internet native who taught himself geolocation during the Arab Spring and later built Bellingcat’s global community. He has spent...

Are sports the most valuable commodity in the world? On this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel is joined by Pablo Torre, a longtime journalist and the host of the podcast and YouTube show Pablo Torre Finds Out. They talk about the role that sports and rampant sports betting are playing in our politics, culture, and economy. Are same-day parlays the new American Dream? Are sports leagues at r...

In this inaugural episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel examines the state of the internet as it stands now in November 2025 with Hank Green, a true citizen of the internet—somebody who has made a living riding the algorithmic waves of the social web. Warzel and Green look back on a time when the internet felt small, more serendipitous, and inspiring, and try to tease apart what went wrong. Are...

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 mak...