On with Kara Swisher - The Gray Area: The End of the Human Internet

Episode Date: July 6, 2026

Today, we're bringing you an episode of "The Gray Area," another great show from the Vox Media Podcast Network. In this episode, host Sean Illing talks with Atlantic writer Charlie Warzel about th...e increasingly weird experience of being online. They discuss AI-generated content, bots, algorithms, the “dead internet theory,” and why so much of the web now feels artificial, manipulated, or unreal. They also explore psyops, conspiracy culture, social media, and the deeper question lurking beneath the AI boom: What are human beings actually for? Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling) Guest: Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is on with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. We're off for the 4th of July holiday, but we still got something special for you today. We're bringing you an episode of The Great Area, another great Fox Media podcast. It's a weekly podcast that looks at culture, tech, and politics with an eye towards philosophy. In this episode, hosts Sean Elling, talks with Atlantic writer Charlie Wirtle about why so much of the internet now feels artificial, manipulated, or unreal. Sean's interviews are always insightful, and Charlie is a friend of this show, so stick around. This is a gray area. I am Sean Elling. My guest today is Charlie Warzel. He's a staff writer at the Atlantic and the author of their newsletter, Galaxy Brain. Charlie wrote a piece about AI and what he calls a crisis of agency, which is this feeling that so much of our lives online are being shaped and distorted by bots, algorithms, and various AI-generated. content. Everything feels a little fake, a little manipulated. If you spend any time at all online, you know what I'm talking about. So we get into why the internet feels so strange right now
Starting point is 00:01:09 and whether it's still possible to build spaces online that feel genuinely human. Hope you enjoy. Hey, quick thing before we get into it, I'm doing a live taping in Washington, D.C. on July 16th at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center. My guest is Gina Ramando, the 40th Secretary of commerce and the 75th governor of Rhode Island and someone who has a lot to say about AI and what it's actually doing to the American economy. She may also run for president so we should listen to what she has to say. It should be a good one. You can be in the room. Head to voxmedia.com Kara Swisher live to register. Spots are limited. We always sell out. The link is in the show notes. One day, with the help of science, you might be able to live forever.
Starting point is 00:02:01 Whatever. Your body will just need a couple tune-ups. Injecting bone marrow in your 40s, your kidney in your 50s, your heart in your 60s, and so on, and then potentially a whole body transplant by the time that you were 90. This week on Explain It to Me, The Quest for Longevity. Find new episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Charlie Warzel, welcome back to the show. Thank you for having me.
Starting point is 00:02:31 Yeah, man. It's been a while. Let's talk about your recent piece in the Atlantic, right? There is a lot of AI discourse right now, but this piece is sort of getting at a part of it that seems a little under-discussed, which is the increasingly weird, bot-haunted internet we all live inside now. So let's just start there. What is the feeling you are describing in this piece? The feeling that I'm describing is...
Starting point is 00:03:02 one of disorientation, but also paranoia, I think. I think what I feel a lot on the Internet right now is this paranoia. And I started the piece with a callback to a piece by the Internet tech writer, Max Reed, who wrote in New York Magazine back in 2018 about what he called the inversion, which is this tipping point where, you know, the bot and fake content, content made. synthetically instead of just by, you know, you or me, human beings may like surpass some of, some of, you know, the content that we all make and that the internet would sort of be just a majority fake to some degree or majority, you know, automated. And that at the time, I remember, was a real revelation for a lot of people, this feeling that, whoa, like,
Starting point is 00:04:02 You're telling me there's all these people using these sock puppet accounts on Twitter or Facebook or wherever that, you know, there's these fake bots trying to sell me stuff that a lot of websites are populated with, you know, automated comments or whatever it is. And now that's honestly a pretty quaint idea that someone wouldn't be as aware of that. Because in the generative AI age or whatever we're going to call it or whatever we're in, basically since, you know, the arrival of chat, GBT, but even before it, you have an internet now that is jammed full of synthetic content in all sorts of ways. So you have synthetic text, you know, all the, all the things that we would call AI slop, right? And now you just have people generating whole sites with the click of a button, right, to promote something that either isn't real or that is, you know, a scam or, you know, like pretty awful. You have that happening on this vast
Starting point is 00:05:10 scale, so much so that Google search most of what you see is going to be garbage, right? Then you have synthetic music, AI slopped videos and things, you know, clogging these feeds. And you have organizations that are doing a new system. style of content marketing, of viral marketing, in which they spin up fake accounts to seed algorithms with information that is befitting their client, right? So if you're an artist, you can have these viral marketing firms that will spam TikTok with your song so that it becomes the algorithm thinks, oh, this is a popular song. And then when other people start posting it, it gets priority inside the feeds.
Starting point is 00:06:04 So it's this idea that, like, what people are really doing now is they're not marketing to human beings. They're marketing to these algorithms. The end result of all of that, right, this idea that everything around you might be fake, it creates this sense of paranoia. It's not just that there's not one thing that people are talking or thinking about,
Starting point is 00:06:26 is that you can make a convincing case that anything you don't like or that you think is suspect or that is weird in some way is a sci-off. It's fake. Somebody has seed at that, right? And that, to me, is a change. It is a dramatic change in the way that people behave online. And it really affects everything from our politics to our culture
Starting point is 00:06:48 because you walk around with this feeling. There's this great term, the liar's dividend, right? Which is the idea that you can, when there's so much garbage out there, people can cast aspersions on things that are real, right? And say, oh, I think it's fake. I think it's a lie, right? You can sort of completely blur and warp reality. And I think that that's the way that culture works now.
Starting point is 00:07:12 So not that we can know this really with any precision, but if you just had to guess, if you just had a big giant pie chart of all the shit on the internet, like roughly what percentage of that pie chart do you think would be synthetic stuff? it's such a good question you can't take the temperature of the entire internet right but you're seeing this play out
Starting point is 00:07:35 in music with I interviewed on my podcast this guy who is the frontman of a very beloved progressive rock band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and they took their music off Spotify
Starting point is 00:07:52 in protest of Spotify funding their founder of funding a defense company. And when they left, they had domain squatters, basically. King Gizzard squatters who came in and took their page essentially by creating AI slop music that sounded similar to their stuff and was making money off their streams and all that. And it had to fight Spotify to get it taken down, which they did.
Starting point is 00:08:21 you have you have so many different playlists on Spotify that are i've done some reporting into this you go into especially like like jazz or just instrumental time music classical music and you start clicking around on some of those artists and you don't see anything any human beings there right like you don't you go to these these you know their youtube page and then the youtube page is just you know, like the, when you don't put a profile picture on it, right? And it only directs you back to the Spotify link. There's no, you know, manager page or anything like that or label. And you start to realize, oh, well, then I guess, I guess that's fake, right?
Starting point is 00:09:07 And so you have, so I'm listening to jazz music that I think is made by another human being. And it's not. And again, that sense of paranoia creeps in when you start to recognize some of some of these things. I think a lot of us want to walk through the world and say, listen, I've got reasonably good taste, I've got reasonably good judgment. I'm not sitting around listening to, you know, fake jazz music. And you might be, right? We all might be. It's not a, it's not a question anymore of taste because there's, there's so much volume. It's just so strange. You know, I mean, I know what you mean, but it's very hard to name, you know, somehow the internet feels fake and real and dead and alive. All of the same. same time, you know, people were clearly still there, but you're never really sure, like, who or what is speaking. You're never sure who made the thing you're looking at or why it appeared in front of you. It seems like we should definitely take a step back maybe and just think
Starting point is 00:10:03 about how bizarre this situation is for our primate brains. Yeah, and that, you know, was kind of coming off the backs of a lot of the early social media backlash to the election of Donald Trump. and people starting to look into, well, what is happening? How is Facebook changing this, right? And then he had the Cambridge Analytica scandal that same year, 2018, where there was what turned out to be, honestly, a bit of an overreaction to what is known as psychographic profiling. I was part of that overreaction.
Starting point is 00:10:42 I think I was too, because we were all figuring out. And this speaks to some of these platforms. and their prominence in our lives, right? It makes a lot of sense to want to assign them an extreme amount of power. You know, they're connecting billions of people. They have all this money. They're building these tools of surveillance to track our every move. There's reason to be paranoid.
Starting point is 00:11:09 You know, Cambridge Analytica was in the business of selling you. The idea that they were changing people's minds left and right all the time, that they could come into a place and affect an election because it's a great tactic. Not coincidentally, that's what the artificial intelligence companies have done for the last four years or so, right? They started with the domer marketing. They started with the, we're going to build something so powerful. It's a Manhattan project for, you know, for words, et cetera.
Starting point is 00:11:44 And so. Yeah, we're going to blow up the world, but subscribe. wherever you get your AI. Right. It's like, okay, cool. Interesting choice. I think we used to think of the internet as an engine of connection, right? Of sharing information, of a real, like a human to human thing.
Starting point is 00:12:03 But it was, it was still deception and fakery. Fakery of Al-Qaeda is obviously a volume game. And artificial intelligence, the generative artificial intelligence, boom that we've seen. It's a tool of scale. You push a button, you get a moby dick, you know, sized, uh, tone of words if you want, right? You can make the same video, uh, and a lot of creators do this 200 ways in 15 minutes. Me talking, doing my thing. Okay, now make that, put me in 200 locations. Let's spam the internet with it. See what the them like, see what people like, and then use that.
Starting point is 00:12:50 It's like, it is a tool for volume, and that volume is synthetic. I mean, maybe if the question back in, you know, 2018, 2019 was, you know, is this a bot or not? I mean, now it just seems like more fundamentally, what the hell kind of environment even is this, right? And like, we don't even have a name for it yet. It's just weird and different. It's not the old internet. It's something else. And in the same way, I don't really think we have a real name for this period of history.
Starting point is 00:13:21 Yeah. I don't think we really have a name for whatever this new internet is, but it's like fundamentally different. It's a different thing all together. It is. And it's what is fascinating to me is the way in which it functions in the, it functions in the in the in the what's interesting to me is the way that it is a outgrowth in some ways of of the the post-truth moment like it we've created we've had this environment right where we're all given access to so much information that we can rationalize it any way we want it's one of my
Starting point is 00:14:09 hobby courses that nobody knows what anyone is doing online and that is a problem right if i say something as a, you know, a columnist at the Atlantic and put something out. The main beef that I get is you're living in some stupid bubble. That's not real. That's not representative of the information experience, right? You're seeing all of this. Get off Twitter, man. Like, it's a bubble. Like, you're just seeing this. That's totally valid and totally true. But there's also a lot of people who are dismissing certain things that are real because they don't want to see them. And also because it doesn't reflect their algorithmic experience of the Internet. And I think it's really difficult when you don't know what anyone else's experience is like,
Starting point is 00:15:03 right? You walk around a little bit feeling kind of insane. Like I feel this sometimes when I plug into whatever discourse or conversation. And, you know, I write about the Internet. I'm not terminally online in my real life. Like I go there for the purpose of understanding it, you know, reporting on it, studying, seeing things that bubble up. I like to be outside in my other times.
Starting point is 00:15:29 People constantly will say, like, dude, you got to get off the internet. And I think that that is, in some ways, a response to what you're saying makes me uncomfortable, not only because I maybe disagree with the information, but because your experience is clearly so different than, mind, that it's, it's awkward for me to imagine that we are existing inside the same culture or that we have to interact with each other and talk about these things. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's not really post-truth. At this point, it's post-reel or post-human.
Starting point is 00:16:06 Like, how much of the Internet at this point is basically just, like, machines performing humanity back at us under the guise of being people, right? So this, for the piece, I referenced this researcher named Aidan Walker. He's a Gen Z online researcher. He's extremely smart about memes. And it's a great example of someone who takes something that's like kind of silly in concept and actually gets to like the philosophical human understandings of all this. And he came up with this theory.
Starting point is 00:16:43 So what we've been talking about, with the, you know, there's machines and algorithms are just kind of like running the whole show, right? That's been referred to as the dead internet theory. The idea that there's really not a lot of humanity on the internet. It's all the bots. And we kind of just sit there. Aiden Walker took that a step further recently.
Starting point is 00:17:07 And his theory, it's somewhat colorful, is that it's like the cuck internet theory. Say more. Yes, we'll have to say more, which is that the product, the synthetic product of these artificial intelligence things, be it like, you know, a slop video of a cat, you know, dancing on a street in Paris or whatever, right, that a bunch of people are flicking through, you know, Instagram reels or Facebook and just, you know, hitting like or whatever, oh, it's cute, I'm going to forward that to whatever. You have that, which is synthetic. It's machines. It's machine made. It's trained off. of all of these other machines. Then you have the algorithm, which is predisposed to like that stuff, because that stuff is all trained
Starting point is 00:17:55 off of what the algorithm has already shown you and given you, right? You have this, when you, what's happening is those things are meeting. Those things are in the room interacting with each other. And the human is sitting in the corner, in the chair, watching that. The human is the, consenting observer to an interaction, a melding of sorts, of these two machines that have been
Starting point is 00:18:24 predisposed to do this in service of viral advertising revenue. And that that is a lot of what the internet is. The internet isn't dead. Internet is really active. It's moving. It's doing stuff. These two elements that aren't human are, you know, doing it all night long. And we, the human, are just sort of sitting there, like, okay, yeah, no, I'll have some more, I guess. Yeah, sure. You know, we are consenting to it in some sense. Other people would argue that, you know, we're being coerced. You know, on the old internet, you had the capacity to explore, truly, right? You would stumble and click around and kind of get lost. And now so much of it is just a giant sprawling machine designed to mainline. into your veins as much content as possible, content optimized for engagement. So you're not really exploring or participating in that way. You were just a passive product.
Starting point is 00:19:24 I mean, as you put it to piece, right, we basically now exist humans to feed data into the machinery. That is what we were doing. And it is keeping us stupefied and entertained along the way. But that's fundamentally what we have been reduced to. Yeah. I don't know that all is lost yet, but I think that, What I described this moment as is as a crisis of agency. Not that it's over,
Starting point is 00:19:54 but we are all really concerned about our future agency. Like, I don't think these tools are powerful enough yet. Like, I think it's giving these tools in Silicon Valley. It's buying too much into the narrative to say, we're all automaton's. Like, you know, I think from a culture standpoint, in a consuming, you know, endless scroll vibe. Like, the best example of this is you go on a social media app or something like that.
Starting point is 00:20:23 Or you're just wasting time on your phone and you look up and you go, man, what, like, that was not how I wanted to use those 20 minutes, right? But that's like that feeling of regret that you might have. That's an example of that consuming part of the agency. But on the side of jobs and, you know, and AI job loss, things like that, I don't think these tools yet, I mean, maybe if you're, if you're a programmer or someone in this highly technical space where these agentic coding platforms are doing such a good job of cranking out inhuman amounts of code so quickly. I can understand that there's fears, but it's more the anxiety of what is coming. We are in this crisis of like, yeah. Generative AI is making us ask this really weird question, which is what is a human for, right? And that's a wild thing to have, you know, publicly traded companies asking you.
Starting point is 00:21:38 What is a human for? And I think that is what we are feeling right now as a society. Whether you are a booster who is worried and has a little bit of the doomerism stuff in it, or you're somebody who's out protesting data centers in your town. A lot of it is centered around this idea of like what is a human for? Support for this show comes from Framer. If your team wants a website that looks and feels handcrafted but is still fast to ship, Framer is built for that.
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Starting point is 00:24:36 He was promising change. Yes, he's a big change. Has he lived up to that? No. No, I wouldn't say so. I was disappointed. We're in Washington, D.C. for one of the events that Donald Trump is throwing for America's 250th anniversary, and it's UFC night. Proud to be American.
Starting point is 00:24:51 We got free tickets. It's just going to be a great time. That's about it. It's an opportunity to talk to a group that was central in the 2024 election, young men. Why do we think Trump and men seem to have a connection? I feel like he just knows how to advertise himself to the younger proud. It aligns with masculinity, I feel like, so a certain extent. But if they don't like this,
Starting point is 00:25:11 don't like Donald Trump, what do they prefer politically otherwise? I care about my family. I care about my country. I want people to be safe and happy where they live. Care about my wallet, too, man. I'm a Sted Herndon, and this is America Actually. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. I wanted to go back to the idea of siops, right? Maybe the answer really is just a paranoia. But that word, sciop has broken containment. what exactly does that mean and and also why has it become so prevalent now is it just everyone's
Starting point is 00:25:57 paranoid of everything well sciop is like a you know it's kind of like a military grade you know it's it's an operation that is that is meant to you know trick you psychological i don't have the definition you know in front of like a clandestine manipulation campaign yes basically great way to put it. And I think that, again, when we talk about anything that's happened in a technological, cultural sense, it all builds off of the stuff that came before it. Right. So, like, that's why the Cambridge Analytica history, I think, is really important here, right? It primes people to see these things as, as experiments, right? These tech companies, made news because they did experiments.
Starting point is 00:26:52 They were experiments in service of, like, you know, trying to tweak their platforms to be better at advertising. Like, they weren't nefarious backroom, you know, horrible experiments in brainwashing and mind control. But again, I think we get to this situation. We're seeing it so much right now in AI. where all these people in Silicon Valley are like, why does every person in the country who's not, you know, deeply involved in these niche discourses or working at these places, why does everyone just reflexively hate artificial intelligence? Like, why does it poll worse than Donald Trump? Like, I, this stuff is so cool. I'm racking my brain. Why doesn't this? It's like, well, you spent a lot of time talking about how dangerous it is, how civilizationally perilous it could be. in the wrong hands, right? How if we don't put the exact right guardrails up, awful things can happen.
Starting point is 00:27:52 We could, you know, we could destroy our economy overnight, right? One of these things could, you know, could take over and manipulate the stock market and crash everything. You hear all of this stuff. And the thing is, when you repeat a lot of ominous crap over time, people start to internalize it. And that is, to go back to the sciops, that is part of it, right? We hear that these companies are so powerful. They're so able to manipulate consumer sentiment. They're so able to drive people to make purchases. They're so useful to drive people to go out to campaign rallies,
Starting point is 00:28:33 and then they get hooked on whatever, and then they start getting in these groups, right? you know, QAnon was this fringe message board thing that was kind of silly and stupid. And Facebook groups became this gathering place during the pandemic for otherwise pretty average Joe normal type people to engage with this thing. And it became this cultural, tribal community-based. ideology that broke contain and radicalized a whole bunch of people. When you see and you have all of these past examples of how this technology can get away from us and changes, people start to internalize that. And it's now people reach for this idea of the sci-op in the same way. way that people reach for QAnon, right? It's just, it's a way to explain something that you don't
Starting point is 00:29:42 want to grapple with or that is uncomfortable or that you don't understand or that you can't easily assign something to, right? The whole, the most recent sci-op thing, controversy, is over this band, geese, this indie band, who are very popular. They've been around for a little bit, but they got very popular in the last year with this album. They were everywhere. they are as a band using some of these viral, apparently viral marketing firms or whatever. That is its own thing. The core issue with the band Geese is that they're polarizing. Their singer has this like warbly kind of sometimes atonal voice. They're like a little bit hard to listen to for some people.
Starting point is 00:30:32 And other people think that they're the Velvet Underground, right? it's this super polarizing thing where someone listens to it and has two completely diametrically opposed opinions. And instead of trying to grapple with that, it's so much easier to just say if you hate geese. Yeah, man, it's a freaking sigh out. Well, the problem with paranoia, it kind of becomes its own trap, right? I mean, like, if you think everything is manipulated, then you just become manipulable in a totally different way, right? But where is that line between healthy skepticism and losing your damn mind online? Because I think a lot of us are living uncomfortably right on that border all the time. It also doesn't help that we, like, live in an era of great corruption, of great conspiracy theorizing, right?
Starting point is 00:31:23 You look at what has happened with Donald Trump and cryptocurrencies and things like that. and you see an unbelievable amount of corruption just happening in plain sight, like rug pulls from the president of the United States and his family. And no real accountability for that, such that society just goes, ah, well, nevertheless. And after a while, again, people are going to internalize these lessons and say, well, if this is what I can see, if this is what I am allowed access to,
Starting point is 00:32:00 then I'm pretty sure this is just how the world works. And so the things that I don't have the tools to explain, that's, you know, it's in some ways it's a rational response to some of these things that are happening, even if they tend to be, you know, irrational theories. What makes something slop? Is it just bad AI content?
Starting point is 00:32:26 It really feels like slop is broken contain in terms of, you know, nomenclature. I'm inclined to say that it follows that pornography standard of, you know it when you see it, right? You know it when you see it. I think what, for me, the way that I think about slop, what a sentence, the way that I deem something as slop would be having a kind of contempt. for its audience, right? Like, you're an idiot. You don't care. You're just scroll.
Starting point is 00:33:09 Like, I'm going to, yeah, here's shrimp Jesus, you know, dummy. Like, when you feel that thing from someone who's like, I'm doing click volume ad arbitrage from the Philippines, from this, you know, center building as many different Facebook pages to spam, you know, unsuspecting. older people without this media literacy to just, you know, oh, yeah, like, you know, did you see that Garth Brooks spoke out about the Supreme Court case at this sold-out concert in South Africa, you know, like something totally random that didn't happen and just, like, shoving it down people's faces because, not because they have any particular political ideology, but they're just trying to make a quick buck. That is what I consider to be slop. You know, I think when you look at
Starting point is 00:34:00 very recently there's been a spate of either sanctioned or non-sanctioned campaign videos that have come out like for for Spencer Pratt in Los Angeles is one of him like as Batman, totally AI generated would have taken, you know, millions of dollars to make. Now somebody can just make it on the outside
Starting point is 00:34:22 the campaign can promote it for itself. It goes viral. I don't see that. It is slop, technically, but I see it slightly different, right? Like, that's, like, almost just propaganda or all that stuff, those Lego videos of Donald Trump coming out of Iran to sort of, you know, knock on the U.S. military response there. I don't see that as slop as much as propaganda as a tool. For me, Slop has to have contempt for its audience in this sense of it's just, it's just, like really low rent, I'm wasting your time and energy in order to make some money.
Starting point is 00:35:04 Well, you may have just answered this, but people seem to get hung up on whether AI can make good art. Do you have a strong take on that, whether something vaguely sloppish can count as good art? You know, I just read this new book coming out by Corey Doctor-O, the activist writer or science fiction writer who points the term in shittification. And he notes in the book, and I think this is a pretty incisive observation, that AI art
Starting point is 00:35:40 is supposed to be, it's not good, but it's like, it's good enough to be offensive and that AI art, I may be, you know, slightly butchering his, his understanding here, but that it's really, It's a proof of concept.
Starting point is 00:35:58 It's supposed to make people a certain group of people really mad. It's supposed to have someone see it and go, oh, man, they're going to put everyone who can draw out of business. It's going to change all this art because that's really useful marketing for these companies. It's a really useful narrative. It's, oh, look how powerful this stuff is, right? And I think what's interesting about that is that a lot of this isn't, is it good or is it bad? Is it powerful? Does it have the ability to disrupt livelihoods?
Starting point is 00:36:44 For me, it's still like the deeper, probably slightly nerdy question is, you know, like, is art still art if you don't experience it as an encounter with another person? Like, I don't really think it is, but I also can't really explain to you why it isn't. I just know a piece of art that didn't come from a human mind that wasn't rooted in human experience. It doesn't mean anything to me. It is literally meaningless. But again, I don't really know why that is. I just feel it. And isn't this part of what's so exhausting about this moment that's been foisted on so many of us who enjoy the human stuff?
Starting point is 00:37:22 You're describing why that conversation is really so hard. And it's that there's like something ineffable about human contact, right? And like, that's why we're all here. We're all here on Earth. Like I think so much nowadays of that, again, I'm but the Kurt Vonnegut quote that, like, we're put on the earth to fart around, right? Yes, I can go have somebody mail the letter for me, or I can send an email, or I can go down to the post office.
Starting point is 00:37:56 and interact with some weird people and see some stuff, and then get a sandwich, and then watch the birds, you know, and do all. And it's like, and then I get a flat tire, and then I have to call someone, and then they help me, you know, on and on. It's like, that's why we're all here, right? To do that, to have those, those weird, unexpected interactions. And this machine's like, what if I told you you don't have to do any of that ever again? And then you go, what is a human for?
Starting point is 00:38:23 I'm stand-up comedian John Marcos Serazy. And I'm actor-penis model, Russell Daniels. The downside is our podcast where we bring on guests to talk about how miserable their lives are. Because let's face it, things are not getting better. Every episode we talk about what's wrong with our lives, our guest lives, the world. But in a fun way. Bottom line is, you're going to walk away feeling better about your life. We've had so many cool guests, Caleb here on.
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Starting point is 00:40:11 What's your favorite part of the internet now? I mean, like, the pods and newsletters, Reddit boards. I mean, is there like, where's like the little pocket of, like, the old internet on the new internet that you retreat to? Well, I will, okay, I have a couple things. I'm not, like, clearly given all this stuff, very skeptical of all the AI stuff in the sense of, like, the future that's being pushed on us. the people who are in charge of it, who in many ways are a lot of the same people who brought us social media, web, too,
Starting point is 00:40:50 and then it's like, oh, we're not going to deal with the consequences of that. We're moving on, you know? That said, I have some real delight using the coding agents sometimes to build little things. I live on an island. I can frequently see
Starting point is 00:41:10 from like across the road and down there's a little window. I can see container ships as they pass sometimes. And I love that. So I coded this thing. I'm not a coder. I coded this little thing that was basically like, go to VesselFinder.com, get the API code,
Starting point is 00:41:31 and then here's my physical location. Made a little app to put on my desktop that just gives me a little like notification. Just it's quiet, doesn't ping, doesn't do anything, just shows. And it says what the ship is. And then I can click the link and see where it came from, where it's going. I love that. I think that's so fun.
Starting point is 00:41:51 And it does it as it's supposed to pop by my thing. And that really actually feels, in a way, like, it evokes the spirit of like the early internet, which is like, I want access to something. I want to try to do something a little bit creative. and you just gave me, you gave me some tools with which I can do that. It didn't harm anyone. It's not taking anything. It's just for me.
Starting point is 00:42:16 I'm not voicing it on anyone. So that is a little piece of internet that I love. Let's leave it right there. Charlie, what is your newsletter and what is your podcast called? And where can people check those out? Both are called Galaxy Brain. You can find it on the Atlantic. You can subscribe to it on the Atlantic.
Starting point is 00:42:38 should subscribe to the publication, but it's also we're on YouTube or Apple, Spotify, wherever you get them. And yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate this. This is a great conversation. All right. Check it out, people. Charlie does great work.
Starting point is 00:42:52 He has for a long time. And he will be back. I have an unreasonably good authority. So, all right, man. Thanks for coming in, dude. Thanks for having me. All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode.
Starting point is 00:43:08 Charlie has always been one of my favorite people to talk to about anything involved. tech and culture. So I hope you enjoyed that. As always, we do want to know what you think. So drop us a line at the gray area at fox.com. Or you can leave us a message on our voicemail line at 1-800-214-5-749. Please also rate, review, subscribe to the podcast. It helps us grow our show. This episode was produced by Thor New Writer and Beth Morrissey, who also runs the show, engineered by Shannon Mahoney and Christian Ayala, fact-checked by. by Melissa Hirsch and Emma Munger wrote our theme music. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy.
Starting point is 00:43:50 The gray area comes out on Mondays and Fridays. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts. If you watch podcasts while you listen, you can do that too. Go to YouTube.com slash Vox for video versions of the gray area. The show is part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.com slash members to sign up. And if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.
Starting point is 00:44:18 Thanks for listening to this special episode of The Gray Area. We'll be back with a new episode of On, on Thursday.

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