Jim VandeHei

If you just gorge on them all day, every day, you're going to be fat, lazy, and useless.

And that's what I worry happened to the general population.

And we contributed to that.

There's no doubt.

I think it's a brilliant observation.

I do think that everything changed.

If you go back, I think that that year, 2007, is a massive year because you start to have massive, you have the iPhone, you start to have phone use, you start to have all these different social platforms start to take off.

And we didn't anticipate that.

That was never really part of our business plan.

Our business plan was coverage.

It was a newspaper at the time, and it was a digital platform.

But because you had those two things happening simultaneously, you have this whole new way of consuming content online.

all day, every day, and that it was based on an attention economy.

It was based on an algorithm that would respond to what you were responding to.

You suddenly had all this political content being mass produced, thrown at an audience that now had a mechanism to mass consume it.

Those two things collide.

It really fundamentally changed the nature of information consumption, and it changed the nature, I think, of our politics.

And our culture, by the way, because you can draw lines with all of this in terms of polarization, toxicity, kind of information as combat.

There was this very famous moment where like at first I thought they thought we were joking.

They didn't think we would do it.