Galaxy Brain

On this week’s Galaxy Brain, host Charlie Warzel dives into the state of the music industry, where streaming economics, algorithmic discovery, and generative AI are reshaping how music is distributed as well as what it means to make music in this environment. The episode traces how playlists and opaque recommendation systems have left many artists feeling like they’re battling an algorithm. With AI-generated songs now flooding platforms, and even in one case landing on a Billboard chart, the episode examines how automation, impersonation, and synthetic “diet music” are crowding into a system already strained by low payouts and creative burnout.

Charlie is joined by Stu Mackenzie, the front man of the prolific Australian band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, to talk about making music in the algorithmic age. From embracing bootleggers to pulling its catalog from Spotify, Mackenzie explains how the band has tried to protect its creative core while the industry transforms around it. Charlie and Stu explore whether we’re witnessing a normal technological shift or something more existential—an era where music is treated as pure commodity.

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On this week’s “Galaxy Brain,” Charlie Warzel takes listeners deep into the internet’s fever swamps to examine how figures who once would’ve stayed on the fringes now dominate mainstream feeds. The episode charts the rise of Clavicular, a young livestreamer who’s gone from an absurdist curiosity to a fixture in the manosphere and its adjacent right-wing influencer culture. Using Clavicular as a lens—his extreme body modification, relentless self-documentation, and a willingness to do anything for attention—Charlie discusses the rise of nihilistic Zoomer influencers. Then he’s joined by the internet-culture researcher Aidan Walker, who helps situate Clavicular alongside figures such as Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate, revealing how the “looksmaxxing” movement collides with grievance politics and an anti-political, “algorithm-first” ideology. Together they explore what happens when the gatekeepers are gone, and when nihilism becomes a default way for budding attention hijackers to build an audience.

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On this week’s Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel opens with what it means to live in 2026, when our phones can drop us into graphic, real-time violence without warning—and when documenting that violence can be both traumatizing and politically consequential. Using recent footage out of Minneapolis as a lens, he explores the uneasy collision of algorithmic feeds, misinformation, and the moral weight of witnessing. Charlie also traces how viral documentation can puncture official narratives, pushing stories beyond political circles and into unexpectedly “apolitical” corners of the internet, even as platform-ownership shifts and suspected censorship (or outages that look like censorship) deepen public paranoia about who controls what we see.

Then, Charlie is joined by Amanda Litman, a political digital strategist and the co-founder of Run for Something. They discuss how to be a good citizen in the information war without losing your mind. Specifically: In an age of algorithmic fragmentation and billionaire-owned platforms, does sharing that devastating image or news article actually accomplish anything? Or is it just performative activism? Together they explore how nonpolitical creators and everyday people can be especially persuasive messengers, and how to pair online engagement with offline activism. It’s an episode about how to stay engaged without surrendering your nervous system and how to use the internet as a tool for connection, clarity, and action, not just despair.

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In this episode of Galaxy Brain, host Charlie Warzel speaks with the reporter Ryan Broderick about how the internet’s fragmentation of attention and facts has bled into real-world political violence in Minneapolis this month. From the viral spread of a right-wing video about day-care fraud in Minnesota to the aggressive ICE activity in the region that followed, the episode charts how online content routinely shapes government action and public perception.

Broderick, who spent days in Minneapolis after the shooting of Renee Nicole Good, describes what he saw on the ground: how protesters and law enforcement are behaving differently this time around, especially with regard to filming and digital organizing. The conversation explores a novel and concerning feedback loop where what happens online spurs real-world interventions, which then generate more content for audiences elsewhere, compounding division and uncertainty about what’s true. 

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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 tolerate tools that silence women through humiliation and intimidation under the guise of free speech.

Warzel is then joined by The Atlantic’s Sophie Gilbert, the author of Girl on Girl, for a conversation about how misogyny has been a constant throughline in the history of internet innovation, from Facebook to YouTube. Warzel and Gilbert discuss today’s AI-powered exploitation and explore how new technologies repeatedly repackage old abuses at greater scale and speed. They discuss why this wave of hostility feels so intense right now, how backlash politics and platform design reinforce one another, and what is at stake if lawmakers, companies, and the public fail to draw a red line with Elon Musk’s Grok.

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