← The David Frum Show
The David Frum Show
Facts Vs. Clicks: How Algorithms Reward Extremism
01:01:46
Charlie Warzel on how our online information became so untrustworthy and how we can fight back. Plus: why America’s Founding Fathers would be appalled by Donald Trump 250 years later and Edward Berenson’s The Trial of Madame Caillaux.
Loading summary
Transcript55 lines
- [00:00]
Range Rover Narrator
When was the last time you indulged your desires felt true Range Rover refinement? The last time you felt total serenity, total confidence, no matter the terrain? Limitless, effortless, Peerless? How far can Range Rover take you? Range Rover designed for distinction.
- [00:17]
Windows Copilot Narrator
Meet the computer you can talk to with Copilot on Windows. Working, creating and collaborating is as easy as talking. Got writer's block? Share your screen with Copilot Vision to help spark inspiration and use Copilot voice to have a conversation and brainstorm ideas. Or maybe you need some tech help with Co Pilot Vision. Copilot sees what you see. Let Co Pilot talk you through step by step guidance so you can master new apps, games and skills faster. Try now@windows.com copilot.
- [00:56]
David Frum
Hello and welcome to the David Frum Show. David I'm David Frum, a staff writer at the Atlantic. My guest this week will be my Atlantic colleague Charlie Warzel, host of the Galaxy Brain Podcast, and we'll be talking about our experiences as new podcast hosts. We both launched podcasts this year. Some of the temptations, some of the dangers, and some of the lessons that we have learned from this year in podcasting. My book this week will be a 1992 history book, the Trial of Madame Caillou, a study of a sensational sex and murder trial in in Pre World War I France. But before getting to either of those things, I want to open with some end of year thoughts as we conclude 2025 and move into 2026. 2026, of course, is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and is a powerful anniversary symbol in the American mind. As we move into this year, there's a strain. There's so many things that are going to be memorable and important and wonderful to celebrate. But there are also some things happening that are really weird. And one of the weirdest of them is a press release by the US Mint just a few weeks ago. They are considering honoring the 250th anniversary of American independence with a set of commemorative or dollar coins featuring the image of President Donald Trump. Now, it's not literally unprecedented for the United States to put living people on the coinage. It's not even totally unprecedented for them to put living politicians on the coinage. The first dollar bill had the face of Salmon Chase, Secretary of the treasury in Lincoln's Cabinet, on the dollar bill. Salmon Chase was a famous egomaniac. One of his contemporary colleagues in the Republican Party said. He's an excellent man. I think that's the quote, he's an excellent man, but he's got the delusion that the Christian Trinity has four persons in it instead of three, the fourth being Salmon Chase himself. So it's not unprecedented. There may be other examples as well. But it is strange and shocking at any time for a living person, and especially a living president, to propose to put himself on the coinage of the money of the United States. And if a founding father saw that, I think they would be kind of startled. They would be more startled, however, at some more serious things that are happening. Some things that actually, unlike the dollar coin, which is just a project, have already happened. In the year 2025, we have seen the President of the United States impose taxes at his sole volition. The Trump Treasury Department issued a release a few days ago that that boasted that they had collected $200 billion in tariffs over the year 2025. That's $200 billion of taxes not authorized by Congress. And in flagrant violation of the ideas and literal language of Article 1 of the Constitution, which puts both taxes and tariffs in the hands of Congress, the President and his team are proposing to spend that $200 billion. They've had many ideas about how to spend it. Maybe they should give the money to the farmers. Maybe there should be a tax rebate. Maybe they should do it with something else. But all of those ideas for spending or tax rebates, again, all of those are congressional authority that the President is arrogating to himself. Something else that would have startled the founders of the country all those 250 years ago. We've seen the growth of an enormous federal police force, ice, which is recruited and seems to take orders not from any kind of institution of law, but from, again, a small team around the President, an almost personal police force of a kind that the United States has not seen before, certainly not on such a scale, and just carrying out actions that, again, would have seemed unimaginable only a little while ago. Mass roundups without any kind of due process, mass deportations. Deportation, of course, is a total presidential authority, but usually there's some kind of hearing. And of course, until now, you almost always. The deported person is sent back to the place the deported person came from, not to a third country to which they had no contact, and not under conditions that are tantamount to torture or at least serious human rights abuse. You would send them home. It's not a crime to be illegally present in the United States. It's a violation of the law, but it's not something that you should be Tortured for. You should be put on a plane, given a hot meal and warned, don't come back. You're breaking the rules. We've seen the rise of presidential retaliation and against media institutions using the regulatory apparatus of the state, regulatory apparatus that belongs to everybody, not just to him, and then using those same grants or threats, grants of regulatory favors or threats of the withholding of regulatory favors to rearrange or redirect existing media companies to be more favorable to him, sometimes successfully, sometimes less so, but always with a kind of intent that would have seemed very sinister from the point of view of the founders of the American republic. And we have seen, maybe most disturbing of all, the use of presidential war powers without any involvement of any kind of legal authority, any kind of congressional authority. We're on the cusp, apparently, of some kind of military action against Venezuela, maybe airstrikes, maybe clandestine strikes of commandos, maybe something more. There's no pretense that there's any congressional authorization of that. And over the Christmas holiday, the president fired missiles into Nigeria, intervening in Nigerian civil strife, again with no pretense of any kind of authorization by anyone other than the president at his own whim. So the big question for the year 2026 is how far has the country drifted from those ideals of 1776 as formalized in the Constitution of 1787 and all the amendments afterwards? And how does the United States move back to the country it intended to be at the beginning, that Americans believed it to be until very recently, and then I think most Americans still want it to be.
- [06:36]
Charlie Warzel
Now.
- [06:37]
David Frum
Here's some good news. It does seem like over the course of 2025, that these lawless actions have lost some of their impact and power. The bad guys seem to be losing a little political altitude as we move into 2026. I don't want to be overconfident about that. I don't want to issue false promises. But it does seem like the ebb and flow of political power is not favoring those who want to use arbitrary power in the way they view abused it. Some examples. There does seem to be, in this second Trump term, a real loss of focus, an inability to keep the main thing, the main thing. The battle over renaming the Kennedy center, the Trump Kennedy Center. That seems like a perfect example of something that any serious authoritarian president would not waste energy over. What does he care? You know, he's staffed it with his cronies. They're going to do the shows that he likes. He's going to be able to blackball the people he doesn't like, does he really need to put his name on it? Does he need to host the Kennedy Honors and primetime television? Is that really something that he needs to invest energy in? And even the dollar coins like that just makes enemies. Why are you doing that? What is the petty, pathetic need that makes you trade the substance of political power for these childish shows? But that need is there, and it's a political fact, and it's an expensive political fact. And therefore, for those who oppose the authoritarian project, a hopeful political fact. But more substantially, two other things are happening that are really changing the political calculus as we move into the year 2026. One is the weakening of the American economy. One of the things that any successful authoritarian knows is you have to get the economy right. People will put up with a lot if they're feeling prosperous. As they enter 2026, fewer and fewer Americans are feeling prosperous. Prices are rising. Job creation is stalling. All the center of energy in the American economy is the artificial intelligence investment boom. That may continue, it may not. But through the rest of the economy, it's trouble. Everywhere there's signs of trouble. Rising corporate bankruptcies, defaults on automobile loans. Americans are not feeling that Trump is thinking of them as he thinks of himself. Trump won. The theory seemed to be that the public would forgive Trump's actions if he provided economic prosperity. Trump, too. The president is actually actively attacking prosperity through his taxes and tariffs, through his immigration policy, shrinking the American population, shrinking the American workforce. And it seems like that's his agenda. So what do you get for putting up with it? Nothing. Just a kick in the head. But the last thing. And Michael Waldman and I discussed this earlier this year in an important podcast discussion. Trump has lost much of his bet to centralize the management of elections in his own hands. Not all of the bet. He's still got tricks up his sleeve. There are many things he's trying to do. But through the genius of American federalism, which is part of the genius of 1776 and 1787, election management is left in the hands of the state of the several states. And while it's not impossible for a president to squeeze and coax and coerce and rig those elections, there are limits to his ability to do it. In the end, it is a state power governed by the actions of the states and administered by officials of the states. And there is a limit to how much the President can successfully intervene to corrupt or distort that process. Now, if the election is close, those interventions and distortions may be enough. But when you have through bad economic policy, you have stoked so much discontent as this administration has. You may have moved the whole political temperature, the whole political balance of political forces beyond the margin of successful manipulation. And that means that the corrective response that the genius of the system always anticipated as the ultimate answer to abuses, that corrective response may be coming, and 2026 may be the year that we feel it. And now my dialogue with Charlie Wurzel. But first, a quick.
- [10:43]
Hauser and Wirth Publishers Narrator
Have you ever wondered how the ideas of today's most influential artists are captured and shared? Hauser and Wirth Publishers does just that, commissioning new scholarship, publishing original writings and exhibition related books, and creating beautifully crafted volumes that deepen our cultural conversations. This fall, discover new titles from Jacques Herzog, Susan Rothenberg and Nicholas Pardi. Visit the ursula Bookshop at 443 West 18th street in New York City and Ursula kiosks around the globe to explore more foreign.
- [11:24]
David Frum
So the Atlantic is today presenting something a little different. I will interview today my colleague Charlie Borzell, who has launched his own new podcast on the Atlantic channel, Galaxy Brain. We'll be talking back and forth. Since the Galaxy Brain podcast is quite new, I'm going to read a little introduction for those of you who don't know Charlie. He joined The Atlantic in 2021 and became a staff writer in 2022. This year he launched his new podcast, Galaxy Brain. Charlie is a graduate of Hamilton College and he's the author of the 2021 book out of Office Unlocking the Power and Potential of Hybrid Work. And we're going to talk about some of the experiences, challenges, temptations of doing a podcast in this day and age, especially for the Atlantic. And I'm happy to welcome Charlie Charlie Congr on the new podcast.
- [12:09]
Charlie Warzel
Thank you. Thank you for having me. This is great.
- [12:12]
David Frum
All right. So we're both kind of newbies. I'm like a grizzled veteran with a three or four month head start ahead of you. So that, that makes me, yeah. A frontline soldier. But we both, we're both familiar with being guests on podcasts, but new to hosting.
- [12:27]
Charlie Warzel
Yes. And it's very different, right? It is. It is a whole different, at least I've found it's completely different. Animal being on the other side.
- [12:34]
David Frum
If I'd known how hard it was, I would have been nicer to my hosts.
- [12:37]
Charlie Warzel
Exactly. Exactly. Yes. It's very difficult construct a conversation and, and, and have it actually, you know, have a flow and end up in the right place and follow the tributaries of, you know, of A, of a guest's, you know, meandering mind. It's, it's, it's definitely, it's fascinating.
- [12:54]
David Frum
Well, so here's this thing. I. So in order to avoid meandering, here's how I propose to channel the conversation so that we, we achieve something that's, I hope, useful and interesting for listeners and viewers and maybe something we both ourselves will learn from. Because one of the things we've had to confront as we enter this is unlike old fashioned book writing or even print text based or even print journalism where you don't know exactly what your readers want and what they read. You know a lot about the podcast audience, both video and audio, and we also have the contrasting examples of other people in the space who demonstrate what viewers and listeners want and don't want. And one of the things we've had to confront is the tremendous appetite or apparent appetite for extreme content, which flies in the face of what the Atlantic is always trying to provide, which is balanced content. How do we make sense of that? How do we respond to that? I mean, I think you get a lot of response to if you do a show on Was Hitler Good? Yes. But we're not going to do the Was Hitler good? Yes. Show. But how do you cope with the massive incentives to do a show on Was Hitler good? Yes.
- [14:04]
Charlie Warzel
I see this as part of a, of a, of a bigger struggle. Right. That I, that I, I write a lot about technology, about media, media ecology, the ways that social media has warped or changed or transformed society. It's a lot of what the podcast is about. And so there's, there's always like a meta element to everything that I am both doing in my actual work and what I am reporting on. And they tend to feed each other. Right. So I look at this as I look at podcasting, especially video podcasting and the regular traditional podcasting, as in many ways almost the traditional problems with Internet based or digital media on steroids. We are now, because of the issues of discovery, because of the advent of everything from generative AI to social networks to declining readership, because a lot of the social platforms have given up on news to some degree. We don't get that same bump from Google, we don't get that same bump from Facebook, et cetera. It has pushed everything to be so much more algorithmically driven. We try to make the best journalistic products that we can, the most responsible ones. But at the end of the day, we are also people who are interested in having that have an impact in the world to reach as many people as possible. And these algorithms are tailored more and more and more to promote the most sensational thing, the thing that outrages, the thing that shocks, the thing that elicits the greatest response. And the greatest response of all of those emotional reactions is outrage, is fear, is shock, is anger. Right? So I look at what we're doing right now as having to chase this type of viewership, right? We are in this attention economy. We are, are basically forced to. If we want people to interact with the thing that we have spent all this time laboring over, we have to find a way to frame it, right? We are all. I think a lot of this is like a marketplace, right? And every vendor is out there needing to, you know, get people and attract people. And so you're, you're, you're constantly reaching there. And, and it's difficult because it pushes people to be the worst versions of themselves. And we have to guard against that. We can't, you know, succumb to that. Like say, you know, just a random person on, on Twitter or X might.
- [16:35]
David Frum
Yeah, now you're blaming the algorithm a lot here, which is a non sentient collection of digits. And that's convenient because it has no feelings. Maybe the user, the listener, the reader is, is a little bit to blame.
- [16:50]
Charlie Warzel
Well, there's a very interesting issue that I have always seen, right, with I hate to blame the reader because the reader is also in some sense the customer.
- [16:59]
David Frum
And we don't, you know, no one ever got anywhere by disrespecting the customer, at least not in public.
- [17:03]
Charlie Warzel
Right.
- [17:04]
David Frum
But let's pretend we're in private for a minute.
- [17:06]
Charlie Warzel
Absolutely. I think that this is a problem. People's actual preference and their stated preference is always very different in all consumerism, but especially with the news. You, you see a lot of people, both online and in reader surveys of all kinds at different places where I've worked, and they say that they want to read more about the, you know, the vegetables, right? Like eat your vegetables type stuff. They want to read about climate change more. Anyone who has worked in digital media in any case, and has access to the metrics can see that stories about climate change, very broadly speaking, do not perform as well as stories about, say, Donald Trump or somebody who is constantly stoking outrage. So there is this real reader preference stated versus actual, right? People are clicking on the outrageous things, the thumbnails with people's eyes that are, you know, bulging out and stuff like that and, and not spending time with that really nuanced headline that is actually Quote, unquote, you know, boring. But inside is a very nutritional and dense and smart story.
- [18:18]
David Frum
Well, this is not a new thing. This has been true as long as there is media. I mean, I remember a passage in Proust, great novel, remembrance of Things Past where a character says who has a beautiful library full of hand tooled volumes which he never opens and he thinks, what if every morning they were delivered to my front door in cheap paper a copy of Pascal's Penses and in that leather bound edition up there, which I open once every 10 years, there was a description of the dress worn by the Duchess of so and so at the party last night. So media is always sensational. But, but here's to my mind, the difference is in 1975, there probably were as many people in the United States who wanted to read or proportionally as many people who wanted to read or consume Nazi based content as there were today, or anti Semitic content as there are today. But either silently or even explicitly, the heads of cbs, abc, NBC, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, that was the media said, you know what they want Nazi content, they want anti Semitic content. They're not going to get it, we're not going to give it to them. And if we, 10 people agree we're not going to give them Nazi content, then they have to get it from pretty obscure places. But there was, there was always that market, there was, there was money waiting, there's $100 bill lying on the sidewalk and no one picked it up. And we have a more competitive marketplace and somebody picks it up.
- [19:44]
Charlie Warzel
This is a little bit though why I blame the algorithms so fully, right? Because the algorithms are also very powerful in terms of broadcasting and boosting the people who are willing to do that thing, right? That these people don't just come out of nowhere, you know, they like. I think very broadly of the ecosystem that you and I are now a part of, right, which is YouTube. YouTube's great innovation, greatest success, the thing that has driven it to be a place where, you know, people are like hundreds of ingesting hundreds of millions of hours daily of video content is the recommendation algorithm. The up next part of YouTube where on the right side of your page it feeds you another video after that recommendation algorithm, as my reporting and other people's reporting has shown over the years, brings people into a little like people call it the rabbit hole, right? Where you watch something. Let's say it's just a World War II explanation video, right? A history podcast about World War II that's not, you know, racist or anti Semitic at all, but they're talking about Hitler a lot. They're talking about difficult subjects, maybe the Holocaust, something like that. And then you get another video and that video is maybe just, you know, 1/10 of 1%, a little more extreme right or someone who's coming from a little bit more of a far right perspective. Fast forward, you can get people down into this funnel and that is an algorithmic boost. And that's why I think this is important.
- [21:15]
David Frum
I sometimes do go down World War II rabbit holes. I'm interested in the subject like every baby boomer. And I find that the algorithm is, as I keep going, the algorithm serves me, is increasingly technical content. So well, what was the difference between a 16 inch and a 14 inch naval gun in World War II? Why was the 16. Why, you know, was the 16 inch gun in fact better? Gets more technical, more specific, more wonky. And I think I'm telling the algorithm, you know, that's what I want. So, you know, there is a kind of thing where we say, ah, we're making it a little more Hitlery, that yes, that's the algorithm, but that's the algorithm knowing you, your real self. And it used to be that like in 1975, CBS would say, you know what, you want stuff that's a little more Hitlery than we're serving, but you're not going to get it. And now the consumer is driving things, isn't he? Or she? I think, I think in World War.
- [22:13]
Charlie Warzel
II, I think we're safe to say he watching the World War II videos. So I agree with that in, in part, but I think that there are other elements here. I was looking a little bit into and I, you know, we talked a bit about discussing this new media ecosystem and the extremism that it, that it can, that it can go towards. And I started doing a little more. I've been following her career, you know, somewhat closely, but looking a little bit more into Candace Owens and listening to a couple of popular things that she has put out. She's obviously in a very extreme voice on the right, very conspiratorial. And there's a great column a week ago in the New York Times by Michelle Goldberg about Candace Owens and how she has played into the conspiracy theory that Charlie Kirk was not killed by the man who was arrested and actually had a summit, a media summit with Charlie Kirk's widow, Erica Kirk. But something that Michelle notices in, in that piece and I think is very apt is that she, Candace Owens, draws a Lot from the true crime genre, which is an extremely popular, you know, genre of podcast and media now, and, and plays a little bit towards the digital sleuths on the Internet. So, you know, these are people who are, you know, vigilante investigators, right. They're taking all the information available on the Internet, trying to, Trying to follow the lead like they're, you know, a detective pursuing a cold case. And she does a very good job at that, at bringing people along for the hunt, right. Of information and giving them these breadcrumbs and telling them, you know, this story's not right. And I think that that is, that is a part of why people who are looking for that, who are looking for, you know, to play this role of detective or who feel that, you know, we don't have the full story. There's information out there. I can piece it together because I, you know, I have the ability. That is where I think the algorithm can intersect with a creator who is trying to manipulate, and then it can lead you into a path that gets you into a place that's a little more, you know, as you, as you put it, Hitlery. Because I don't think people are necessarily, broadly speaking, just saying, yeah, that was good about World War II. I, I want. I want some Hitler now. Right. I think what it, what it is is they believe there's a conspiracy.
- [24:39]
David Frum
I explain something that baffles me. So if I go on the Internet, if I'm having trouble getting the little disk battery into my key fob, my car key fob, and I'm flummoxed and the written instructions aren't helpful, and I go online to find a YouTube video that'll say, how do I get the disc. Disc battery into the key fob? If there's someone there saying, leave it on the doorstep, and the leprechaun overnight with a little bit of milk, and the leprechauns will come and fix the key fob for you. That, you know what, I'm skipping that one.
- [25:06]
Charlie Warzel
Right?
- [25:06]
David Frum
That doesn't sound like it's going to work.
- [25:09]
Charlie Warzel
Right.
- [25:10]
David Frum
So why don't people have that response, like the police, There's a killing, the police have arrested somebody. There is a suspect. It may not be that person. But the idea that there's some global collection conspiracy of leprechauns who did it instead, that's pretty unlikely as it is. They will save my key fob for me. You know, yes, I take the point about the digital sleuthing, but at some level, people have to have like a Common sense meter, don't they?
- [25:36]
Charlie Warzel
But 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, you know, they're owned by whatever shadowy people, right, who, who have their own agendas in whatever, who are using your money and, you know, they're funding their indulgent lifestyles and who knows what they're doing, right, 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. And that's the thing, because it opens up this way world to people where they say, okay, now, now I understand, like the, the, the unlock in my brain for this why conspiracy theories are so popular now in, in culture. They've always been popular, obviously, right? The, you know, the, the, the. The paranoid mind is, is. Is a, A fixture in, in all of history, but especially American history. These, these theories, however strange or, 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, 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. Yeah.
- [27:19]
David Frum
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. It's a trope. It's the same 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. So 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 a touch 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 know you're to blame. You're the problem. It's not the bankers, it's not de. Industrialization, it's not the crisis of modernity. It's. It's you dumbhead, it's you vaccinate your child.
- [28:44]
Charlie Warzel
Well, first off, I, I fully agree on, on that. It is. If you are denying your child vaccines or things like that, that is, that is on you. I'm not. And I understand that there is this fatigue with trying to, 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. When you combine this idea of I am frustrated, I feel, I feel bad, I can't see, you know, the, 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, you know, 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, you know, essentially endangering the lives of their children or doing whatever awful thing, but I see this as like all of these systems making it very hard for people to break out of that mold, to do, to do the right thing, to, to go against the grain of those people.
- [30:17]
David Frum
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?
- [30:35]
Charlie Warzel
I think that's really, really difficult. Okay. Something that our boss, Adrienne LaFrance, who's the executive editor of the Atlantic, said on a podcast I did with her, which was about. It was. We were covering the. The. The Epstein files, The. The first dump of all this, right? 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. The durability of the Epstein conspiracy theory, is that people still want the truth, right? That is a. 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. These difficult paths. But that is actually our job, right? We are purveyors of. In. In, you know, in an ideal world of that, we 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 to be looking here for the truth, which is here. And we are the people who are going to, you know, do that job.
- [32:08]
David Frum
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, because if many times more people watch Candace Owen and 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. 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, yet we'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. I died 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, that there was. 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. The mainstream is paranoia, conspiracy, deception. It is a countercultural act to stand up for integrity and truth and self correction.
- [33:41]
Charlie Warzel
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, it's very strong. I think, I think to something that I have noticed that has been very, 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, that are, that are there in order to build trust among, among readers and viewers or credibility, right. The idea of fact checking, the ideas of editing, right. Those things are, 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, 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 has 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. And the idea that behind it from them is we're giving you everything unvarnished, 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.
- [35:18]
David Frum
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. So 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 modern arts 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 response, which is the seal frame was the structure of reporting and research and editing and fact checking and legal. Legal checking. And then it was hidden behind, you know, the, the writing that, 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, 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. And 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.
- [37:17]
Charlie Warzel
Yeah, this is always the tension here, right? Because. And this is a little bit too, where 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, that is far more prevalent on the right. Like these algorithms are helping them in an outsized way. So 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.
- [38:10]
David Frum
Well, but it's not nihilism. It's. It's anti. Institutional of a different kind. And maybe that's one of the things we can't, I mean I. One of the things that when you and I talked in advance about what we were going to do and I'm taking 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 one of the. 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. And if you watch like the Sunday morning shows, this is the game in its most classic form. And afterwards the politician can convert, congratulate himself because he went on TV, took 11 minutes of everybody's time and said nothing of interest and that, 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, if you are going to play the game, if you're, 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. And 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 realize, 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. And 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.
- [40:18]
Charlie Warzel
This is why I've. 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 defense, they're running out the clock, whatever you want to call it. On the whole interview, I 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? Uh, do you think about the. The parasocial relationship? Like, are you thinking about building a relationship with, you know, audience members, people who are interested in. In coming for, you know, for your thoughts, but also just like investing in that. 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 nope today? Like, this is the subject I want people to learn about, and I just think about it on that. On that very granular, episodic basis.
- [41:24]
David Frum
Very much the former. Very much the former. Because I think when I think of this as being culture countercultural, the podcast is this. 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, 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. People I fight with, I don't want. This is my actual office. This is where I write. These are my actual books. These are my actual personal souvenirs. 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 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. 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. So. And, 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 are not that began as parasocial, that are now real people I may not see very often, but who 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's servants.
- [43:05]
Charlie Warzel
I fully agree. I mean, this is. Those are my friends there. I mean, like, it's, it's. 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 out. I brought on my first episode, this YouTuber Hank Green. Right. And now YouTube allows you to have a little collaboration thing so 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, and, and similarly like trying to have a, have, have a conversation about something that is. 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. On the Epstein news right after that is. You know, my most successful episode is. Is chasing the news. Is chasing the thing that. That YouTube's algorithm already knows is sticky. And I've watched. I would love to know if you've seen this. I, Because I cover this stuff. I'm really interested in the dynamic, 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, like, you know, up, up into the, up into the right direction on the graph and then stall immediately. And it's, you're watching an, an algorithmic, not suppression because that's, that's, that's kind of ridiculous to say, but you're watching something happen, right? It is, it is moving and then it kind of stops. Either it's reached the audience of people that care in that sense or, and I find that, 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, in a way that is, is, is hopefully, you know, giving people some, some responsible tools to actually learn about the world in a way that we feel is credible and true. I think it's really makes me very frustrated to have to work against these powerful other forces that are goading you into being the worst version of yourself.
- [45:43]
David Frum
Well, that's, that's that I share that feeling. It's true. Have to lean against the wind. And one of the things I think a lot about, I don't want to make this a 2 partisan, a political point. So 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 helping, helping, 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. Too many, many more. And 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, 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're no far. 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 better People, many people become better versions of themselves. Many 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, and without being a megalomaniac about 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. And that's a very valuable human experience. And even if it fails, it's still valuable.
- [47:58]
Charlie Warzel
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 just very candidly like, it's very empowering, right? Because it allow, I think that there has been so much apologizing and, or you know, 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, you know, being an insurgent, trying to be an insurgent force. And I think that's really powerful. I would, I mean, 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 hard headed, 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 seem to have a pretty explicit purpose, right? Like let, let's shine a light on this thing. Hopefully it will restore, you know, the pillars of democracy, right? Or you know, gird, gird everyone in that way. And I think that for the most part, broadly, it kind of lost its sea nature. Right? Okay, this guy won a second time. What, 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? To say, let's come back.
- [50:03]
David Frum
There are 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 seeming 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.
- [50:23]
Charlie Warzel
I think that should be, that should be the new motto, right? Get rid of democracy dies in darkness. I'm not going to let the bastards win.
- [50:30]
David Frum
And emphasize the eye. And anyone who's watching, you're the eye. 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 Water 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, 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 and, and, and, and to join us in being co publishers because that's what we all are. We're all co publishers.
- [51:04]
Charlie Warzel
And I think one, I have to say when, 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. Because that is a huge problem.
- [51:23]
David Frum
Charlie, thanks so much for making the time for me today and congratulations on the new show. We're co publishing this. This is an interesting experiment and may it flourish. Thank you.
- [51:32]
Charlie Warzel
Absolutely. Thank you.
- [51:38]
Range Rover Narrator
Here's to quitting. Quitting the couch for a quick run. Quitting the snooze button for a morning workout. Quitting giving up after two weeks. You see, staying committed to your fitness goals isn't easy. But with Apple Watch, you don't have to do it alone. Because Apple Watch gives you real time motivation plus advanced metrics that track all your work workouts so you can stick to your New Year's fitness resolutions and once and for all, quit quitting with Apple Watch. IPhone 11 or later required.
- [52:08]
Ryan Reynolds
Hey, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. You know, one of the perks about having four kids that you know about is actually getting a direct line to the big man up north. And this year he wants you to know the best gift that you can give someone is the gift of Mint Mobile's Unlimited Wireless for $15 a month now you don't need even need to wrap it. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.
- [52:29]
Range Rover Narrator
Of $45 for a three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes if network's busy taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com.
- [52:40]
David Frum
Thanks 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 Caillou. Caillou, 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 Caillot 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. So Joseph Callot, the husband of Madame Caillot, 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 Caillou, Madame Caillot's husband, had led a very checkered life, many affairs with many different women. Although he was financially, he was quite above board sexually. He was very public in his flamboyant personal life. Madame Caillou 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 Caillou and his second wife, Henrietta Callo, had started their relationship while Joseph Callo was still married to his previous wife and while Henriette 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. Now 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 Henriette 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 the 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. Now, it's a case that involves, 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 the Figaro, waited for an hour and shot the editor dead, and then drove in the same car to the police police station. She 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, is interesting is because the reason that this trial got, 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 in order to make the point that the kaios 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 FICRO to a duel and fought him instead of letting his wife do his dirty work for him. Like somebody should have 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. Now, 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 that 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? Aren't we wiser? But another thing that might happen, and this is why I found the book so interesting to read. And at the turn of the year 2025, he said, 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 were 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. Maybe 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. One 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, pre1914 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 grandchildren? That's it for this week's and this year's edition of the David Frum Show. Happy New Year to all who are observing the passage of time from 2025 to 2026. The show will post on December 31, 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 express 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 we support all of my colleagues, including Charlie as well. Follow us on social media platforms X avidfrom, Instagram, avidfrom and please if you can share and subscribe to this content. It 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 Frum Show. This episode of the David Frum show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdes. 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.
- [60:49]
John Dick
They say if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. My name is John Dick and I'm never, ever in the wrong room. So I started a podcast to introduce you to some of the brilliant people I've encountered along the way. But we'll also keep it real. So we'll ask these incredibly successful people to share some of their most embarrassing stories. Their dumbest mistakes. Mark and I talked about his inspiration and audacious goals for the business, how he's succeeding without spending a penny on marketing, and how he would fix our broken health care system if he had a magic wand. We also talked about how sports has changed since he walked away from the Mavs, what we're learning from our Gen Z kids, and why eggs are always better when dipped in ketchup. So I hope you'll enjoy the latest quadrennial conversation with Mark Cuban and me, the dumbest guy in the room.