--:-- Erik Torenberg: Humans who are able to be creative and use AI tools correctly will have superpowers.
--:-- Chris Hayes: Does AI so ruthlessly optimize for that former, what you will pay attention to? It totally alienates you from the latter, what you want to pay attention to.
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: Acquisition and retention are different things, right? It's amazing how sort of bad, schlocky, and ineffective most internet advertising is.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: I would literally bet large portions of my net worth in time, that's the future. That's going to be the game. AI is going to upstream everything about the consumer experience.
--:-- Chris Hayes: We're in the midst of an apocalyptic transformation in how we get energy. And it's just not that sexy.
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: We're not all going to be famous for 15 minutes. We're all going to be famous to 15 people.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: 15 people, yeah. In a world where everyone is famous to 15 people, what happens when AI starts generating content for all of them?
--:-- [Podcast intro music fades in and out]
--:-- Erik Torenberg: In this episode, I'm joined by author and MSNBC host Chris Hayes, and longtime ad tech operator and writer Antonio García Martínez, to talk about the shifting economics of attention, how we got here, what's breaking, and what AI might make worse. Chris's new book, *The Siren's Call*, is about the way our attention has been bought, sold, and overwhelmed. Together, we explore the rise of AI slop, whether platforms can contain it, and what comes next as digital content, fame, and identity get increasingly fragmented. Let's get into it.
--:-- [Disclaimer reading]
--:-- Erik Torenberg: As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. Please note that a16z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com forward slash disclosures.
--:-- So excited to have you on, Chris. Antonio is a longtime friend and collaborator of mine. We have a show. Antonio, why don't you briefly introduce yourself?
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: Yeah, I started in ad tech, I guess, in 2008, in attention capitalism, as Chris would call it, and worked in a number of startups. I was an early member of the Facebook ads team back before the IPO when the ad system was horrible. For those old enough to remember—I suspect Chris is probably in the same bucket—Facebook ads used to be these little postage stamps on the right-hand side, and then they became this huge money machine. I wrote a book about that time called *Chaos Monkeys* that came out in 2016.
--:-- Chris Hayes: I've read it. I quoted it in the book.
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: Yeah, yeah. I was a media figure writer guy for a while. I don't know how you do it, Chris. It drove me basically crazy. So I went back to tech.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: And I'm ahead of that. Antonio famously says the prize for beating Matt Iglesias in the Substack rankings is you then become Matt Iglesias. And that wasn't inspiring enough.
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: I'm not anti-Matt, but we were briefly among the top 10 or 15 Substackers on a revenue basis circa 2021. And he was definitely a comp, I guess. Him and Andrew Sullivan were definitely the winners of that race. I feel like I would probably have more to learn from you guys than you have from me. So I'm happy to talk and maybe I'll ask you some questions.
--:-- Chris Hayes: I sort of think like the whole thing is about to collapse. I think there's just a huge pollution problem. I think that the treatment of spam in the book is the sort of signature pollution of attention capitalism of the attention age. If it's lucrative to aggregate lots of attention, where attention pools and collects, there will be money. And to the extent that you can cheaply automate the extraction of that attention, even if it's done in a sort of brute force, wasteful way, there's going to be spam. It's happened to junk mail. It's happened on phone calls. It's happened on text. It's happened on email. But I think the idea of AI content creation now puts that at scale for all the social media platforms.
--:-- I guess the question becomes: is the AI social media content generated actually compelling enough that it doesn't feel like spam and it just dislocates all human creators? Do people not like it? So the algorithm stops serving it up? Or does it overwhelm the experience in a way that starts to feel like the way that our inboxes feel? Is AI slop going to win?
--:-- Erik Torenberg: Yeah, that's one way of saying it. Is AI slop going to win? I mean, yes and no. You're seeing it in the 4U tab on Twitter already. And maybe I would think this because I was creator paid for my creations to some degree. But I think a lot of it is empty and sterile. And I think humans who are able to be creative and use AI tools correctly will have superpowers.
--:-- Chris Hayes: I'm pretty obsessed right now with AI slop and particularly these sub-genres. What's funny about a lot of AI is that it doesn't actually feel that sophisticated. It just feels reverse engineered in a way that you can trace. Not all of it. But some of it does. There are moments we all have with this technology where you're like, "Oh my God." But for instance, it's clear that religious themes and babies do well. So there's this whole universe of AI babies singing "Bless the Lord, Oh My Soul." There was one I saw yesterday that's Jesus with a baby. They're both singing "Bless the Lord, Oh My Soul." And Jesus is holding a disembodied foot, which is just signature AI slop.
--:-- To me, the question about all this stuff is one of the theses of the book: there's this disconnect between what we *will* pay attention to and, in some volitional sense, what we *want* to pay attention to. The question is, does AI from the generative perspective and AI from the machine learning algorithmic perspective so ruthlessly optimize for that former—what you *will* pay attention to—that it totally alienates you from the latter—what you *want* to pay attention to? And if it does do that, do people stick with it, or do they reach some point where they feel too alienated from what they want to be spending their time doing?
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: Well, I think the challenge there is what you put, Chris. By the way, I think it's time to just plug Chris's book. I think you wrote a phenomenal book, actually.
--:-- Chris Hayes: Well, thanks.
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: I would recommend it to all my tech people. One of the things you cite is, to use the marketing speak, acquisition and retention are different things. It's one thing to acquire attention. I think you cite the example of someone going into a room and firing a gun in the air. Well, you've acquired attention, but then how do you maintain it? Even with the guy with a gun in his hand, it might be a little hard to maintain it. That's the challenge. If you're a sophisticated marketer, you realize it's not just about acquisition, it's about the retention side of it.
--:-- I don't know. A positive side of me thinks humans aren't going to sit there and stare at the slop all day. That said, I've used TikTok like a meth head, like getting into a fentanyl fold on the street. I emerged two hours later, I come to you and what the hell just happened? And then I delete the app from my phone because I never want to do that again. So that's maybe the counter argument.
--:-- Chris Hayes: Well, first of all, thanks for the kind words. I appreciate it, especially because I'm not a practitioner in ad tech. So much of the story is an ad tech story. I think deeper than ad tech, ad tech is epiphenomenal to the story. So it's really gratifying to hear that from someone who's worked in it.
--:-- And yeah, I've had the exact same experience. The defining metaphor of the book is the sirens call—Odysseus on the mast, trying to avoid the sirens with your volitional conscious self against the kind of lulling that happens. All of us are in that position. But I think I have the same faith as you that fundamentally there's something irreducibly human and that people are going to just rebel. We'll rebel against slop.
--:-- Which brings us back to this first question, which I do think is really interesting: if the slop overruns it, what does that mean for the platforms? Is it something that they have to start actively managing in the same way that at scale somewhere like Twitter, they started to have to deal with a bunch of really difficult content moderation questions? Tough calls where they're trying to create a user experience that is not going to repel people and is going to attract advertisers. I do wonder if AI generated content becomes a set of questions like that for TikTok and for Reels at a certain point.
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: We've had a slop problem before AI. I mentioned LinkedIn earlier in terms of how fake that network feels, but also on Instagram. People have Finstas—fake Instagrams—for a reason. This idea of who you present yourself as and who you actually are, what you actually think, has been a problem with social networks for a while. It's not obvious to me that AI will make the problem worse in terms of accelerating or emphasizing either fake stuff or stuff that people don't want to be engaging with.
--:-- Chris Hayes: Why are you so convinced that it will expand that gap between what we want to be engaging with and what we actually engage with?
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: I just think it's a quantity and automation question. One of the things about online success is that it's not a batting average. It's your total number of hits. It's a batting average if you're trying to make a living, and you only have so much time. But Mr. Beast talks about this. Other people talk about it too. Always be posting and see what works. Sometimes you could post the same things 15 times and one time it takes off and other times it doesn't. If you're thinking about it as this quantity game—and this is where the brute force spam analogy comes in—if you're automating a thousand videos every day and just throwing them at the algorithm for content farming purposes, does that start to overwhelm everything? Because you can just do—I can't make a thousand videos a day, but you can now. To your point, you could even imagine this not as a slop spam thing. You could imagine it as someone who's actually pretty good using that automation. The brute force scale issue—maybe it never comes up, but it just seems to me like I'm starting to see it crop up and I wonder what it's going to do to the existing models for these platforms.
--:-- Chris Hayes: One thing I find interesting about the impact of social media—you cite a lot of the negative impacts, and you cite one book, *The Frenzy of Renown*, that I actually started reading based on your recommendation.
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: It's a great book, isn't it?
--:-- Chris Hayes: I'm going to be that guy so quick. I think I have a line in *Chaos Monkeys* that says, "Andy Warhol was wrong. In the future, we're not all going to be famous for 15 minutes. We're all going to be famous to 15 people."
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: 15 people, yeah. It's a great line.
--:-- Chris Hayes: The fact that everyone carries themselves like they are a Kardashian every way they go. As a tourist in Europe, the fact that you have a line of people taking selfies in front of the thing—people are already imagining themselves under the spotlight. As a side thing, I work at a tech company. It's very young. The Zoomers themselves cited that you feel like you're being observed all the time. Everyone is like a celebrity who goes out in the wild. If you yell at a waiter or you do something stupid—which we've all done—suddenly you can become insta-famous for it, and nobody wants that.
--:-- Chris, you and I are probably old enough to remember that four times when we were young, dumb kids, if you didn't go to jail and didn't go to the hospital, it didn't happen. It was gone. Maybe it remains as local lore, but it never got bigger than that. You weren't really worried about anything. Somehow that's totally changed the way that people think about themselves.
--:-- Chris Hayes: I think one of the things I write about in the book a lot is the effects of social attention on you and what it does. That democratization of fame is a genuinely new phenomenon that's different from past eras. I think you're right. It is behavior modifying. For me, I have the experience of—fame is always totally relative, different people are famous in different places—but people recognize me on the street. I have that awareness that if I screamed at a car that cut me off, or almost hit me as it was running the corner, people might know that was me and associate it with me. So there is that behavioral modification part of it. But there's also something profoundly warping about it psychologically.
--:-- I think that point you just made is a really interesting one. There is some kind of pro-social effect of not wanting to be a complete maniac in public because that might go viral. That's an interesting pro-social aspect of it. But I also think there's something so warping about it. I quote this in the book: the move from public posting to group chat is 100% driven by that. More and more of all the traffic—Instagram talks about this all the time—is happening in private messaging. Things are happening in private Facebook groups, Signal chats, WhatsApp chats. People are trying to reclaim a private space that's not public space. That's one of the bigger trends happening, precisely because of how warping and disquieting it is to be in this kind of digital panopticon and the subject of near constant total surveillance and social attention.
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: You're totally correct. I want to get back to the group chat thing because towards the end of your book, you become a little bit of a doomer, Chris. You start trying to cite solutions to the problem. The group chat is an interesting one. But I want to focus on one thing you said: is it pro-social?
--:-- One of the things I noticed right after I wrote *Chaos Monkeys*, I lived on a small island in the Northwest in what's called the San Juans. These beautiful islands.
--:-- Chris Hayes: Yeah, I've been there. It's beautiful.
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: Yeah, it's a cool place, very small town. The reality is everyone's famous in that neighborhood. Everyone knows who everyone is and their family. If you did something totally crazy and off the bend, you'd still catch hell for it. You wouldn't get away with it. A lot of our focus on privacy—I know this is a bit of a rabbit hole, I don't know if you want to go down here—but you look at the history of privacy. Louis Brandeis basically created in 1890 this sort of disquisition called "The Right to Privacy" that he more or less invented. The word privacy doesn't appear once in the Constitution. The reason is because at the time, it wasn't used in the sense that we mean it, which is the right to live as a stranger among strangers. That was a right that was more or less invented to cope with urban living where you were losing this ability to actually know everybody.
--:-- Long wind-up to getting to: I think the group chat phenomenon—not everybody can go in the group chat. There's an admin. If someone gets completely out of control, they get booted. Everyone kind of knows everyone. You don't really want to piss people off because there's typically some theme, often professional. I'm in a group chat with Erik and a lot of people that have worked together and invested through those companies. You can't be that much of a dick, to be blunt, because you'll take a hit for it. So it's self-regulating. If I was to propose a solution to our current bind, it's not less technology and a Butlerian jihad against this thing. I think it's using technology in some way to recreate.
--:-- Chris Hayes: I totally agree with that. I do think the scale ends up being really the problem. The question to me is, where is the revenue in that model? This is something I'm really obsessed with. It's the germ of something that I explored in the book and I'm writing about now in relation to AI. We tend to conflate, particularly in this era, useful tech and lucrative tech. Those are not the same. There's technologies that are incredibly useful that are not particularly lucrative—penicillin, antibiotics. No one's making enormous fortunes off them. Even solar power, which is arguably the most useful technology of our age, is a perfectly profitable enterprise, but no one's making Rockefeller fortunes off of solar right now. Then there's technologies that are incredibly lucrative but not particularly socially useful. The FanDuel DraftKings tech is really good tech, and it works really well, but it's not particularly useful compared to penicillin.
--:-- One of the things that happens in a digital space that is so dominated only by commercial options is you don't get as much useful tech that might not have a great business model. So what's the sustaining business model of the group chat? That's an interesting question. Obviously, WhatsApp, which Meta owns, is an incredibly valuable division of Meta. Signal is fascinating because it is a nonprofit and I think a really interesting model in that respect. But to your point, I totally agree about this reclaiming of community, reclaiming dumb bar numbers or IRL reactions. What I say in the book is that normal relationships are born of bilateral exchanges of social attention, as opposed to unilateral. That's the way we're all conditioned to work. The question is, it's not a particularly lucrative tech to reclaim. Is there some fundamental tension between what the revenue model incentives are and what the tech is best for us as people?
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: One take on that, Chris—just to give you the view from the crypto trenches, because I work at a crypto company—group chats are actually huge in the crypto space. It's usually on Telegram, which is an app that most normal people don't use, or most Americans don't use certainly. There you either pay to enter the group chat, or some apps have actually literally tokenized being able to go into the group chat. You have to buy so many of the token. The owner of the group chat was the guy who's leaking the alpha because this is all very speculative. The token represents his value. There's a company called Front Tech that was short-lived. I was part of it for a while and I had a channel, and you could buy the DAGM token and you could join the group chat as part of it. But I think the lesson there is that if you over-financialize things, it loses the social side of it, which crypto does a lot. AI is everything is computer and crypto, everything is money.
--:-- But yeah, I agree with you. One place I'd maybe quibble with you a little bit—I'm confused myself. I think the world we're heading to, the digital version of things, is like the mainstream premium economy version of the world. Our friend Marc Andreessen—the A on the side behind you, Erik—famously said that some people are reality privileged. Some people are wealthy enough or live in a certain context in which they don't need the VR headset because their life is good enough. Everyone else gets the VR headset. How do you strike that balance between the digital versus the real version of it?
--:-- I think what happens—and I think it's the subtext to your entire book, Chris—who we interact with, who we agree with, is completely uncoupled from our actual physical place in the world. I think that tension between the physical and the intellectual is at the heart of all of this. I think the nation state is cracking up in a way—just to get doomer for a second. I think the internet's definitely behind part of it because you don't have the sense of collective consensus that the media and TV used to create during the Cronkite era. There used to be some level of synchrony or synergy that would happen with Cronkite saying, "And that's the way it is." Now I scroll my feed versus Blue Sky, and it's like, no, I don't know what the way it is. It's not quite clear the way it is.
--:-- Chris Hayes: What's really interesting is to think about it from being the opposite problem. So much of what happens in the 20s and 30s, particularly when you have these huge mass broadcast mediums that can capture attention at scale, is that you have this opposite problem: the problem of the mass media. This is something that Lippmann encounters when he has a job basically propagandizing for entrance into World War I. He realizes, "Whoa, this is an insanely powerful tool. You can blast out messages at scale to all these people and get them all thinking the same way or moving the needle in some way." That was a problem that Lippmann wrestles with, and all sorts of different folks wrestle with. Now we have the opposite problem. There is no getting anything like that.
--:-- I've even come to feel that one way to think about a public is paying attention to the same thing together. I've come to feel weirdly old man nostalgic for the Super Bowl, or when everyone's talking about *Love Island*, because it feels like, "Oh, here's a thing that everyone is paying attention to." I'm not watching *Love Island*, but I know that everyone is. I find some weird comfort in that.
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: It's so funny because 20 or 30 years ago, particularly if you're Gen X and you thought of yourself as alternative in whatever way, that was stultifying mass culture and middlebrow.
--:-- Chris Hayes: But I've come to miss that because I think it's the thing we're sort of missing. Football is really the only thing left. That sort of everyone pays attention to together.
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: The elections.
--:-- Chris Hayes: Yeah, and elections, although we pay attention in such different ways. But I do think there's something lost in that. I don't know how to get it back. I'm also fully aware it might just be that I'm 46 and I'm just succumbing to the nostalgia of middle age.
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: What was the last literary event that every American paid attention to? My vote is for Jonathan Franzen's *The Corrections*.
--:-- Chris Hayes: I was literally going to say Franzen, *The Corrections*. Everyone had it. It's a great book, by the way. I like Franzen as a writer. Everyone had to read that damn book. Since then, it's never been the case that everyone's read the same book at all.
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: With the possible exception of David Foster Wallace and *Infinite Jest*. But it's one of those books everyone claims to read, but no one's actually read.
--:-- Chris Hayes: I think people actually did read *The Corrections*. It's weird because if you talk to Gen Xers, and particularly people like Marc again, who came from maybe not poor mainstream America, what they always say about the internet is, "Oh, I finally found my people. I was interested in whatever some weird little niche obsession that in your little Midwestern town, there's nobody doing it."
--:-- What's also interesting to me—and I'm always curious about the tech. I feel like I don't have a great sense, and maybe you guys have a better sense of this. I think it's very funny that we refer to "the algorithm" as a definite article. It's sort of totemic, almost like a deity. "The algorithm served me this." It's always just unclear to me how sophisticated the algorithm actually is. Sometimes it just seems very dumb to me where I look at one thing and then it serves me 15 of that. I probably could have coded that. That's not that impressive. Sometimes it does find things where I'm like, "Oh wow, there's something interesting happening here."
--:-- I write about the book, taking a gummy and realizing that it's just showing me pictures of sandwiches. After 30 minutes of just—it's like, "Oh, it knows that I'm high." That's a kind of magic.
--:-- One of the things I think is interesting is there will be these kinds of things that go viral or have this kind of allergic resonance that everyone is then talking about, or everyone does—particularly Gen Z—references, or even the way that people talk. This sort of brain rot Gen Z way of talking is really interesting to me because that does seem recognizably mass. In the same way the 1960s had "far out" and "groovy," there is this really distinct argot of Gen Z. But they're getting it all not from mass culture, but from algorithmic social media. That to me is super fascinating because there's something that's enduring beneath the kind of technological or institutional layers of how culture is being mediated and how attention is being captured and bought and sold.
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: I forget who it was that I met. They visited Ireland recently and visited family. The kids had the same argot as in the U.S. If you had visited Ireland 20 years ago, you wouldn't be able to understand them because they spoke some dialect that would be unintelligible to American ears. You see that actually in the U.S. This is the thing that I'm really obsessed with too. One of the things that's really fascinating is the lack of geographical distinction in geographical cultures. You're starting to see this show up in politics. It used to be the case that rural Mississippi and rural Minnesota voted very, very differently. That's because the people that occupied those places had different ethnic backgrounds—Minnesota was like Scandinavian socialists—but also different religious traditions, Southern Baptist versus Lutheran. There were all these defining geographic features of different places that would show up in politics. Increasingly, there is this kind of homogenization happening where all rural folks of certain demographics more and more vote like each other and also listen to the same music and have the same kind of omniculture. That's also true of big city, college-educated, upper-middle-class folks. You could go to the cool neighborhood in Columbus and there's going to be some restaurant called Stern and Stem that serves farm-to-table gastropub food. It's interesting that these omnicultures supplant localism in this moment when we don't have massness as the central cultural feature.
--:-- Chris Hayes: The place is called Pine and Spruce in Seattle, but it's exactly what you're saying. It's all called stem to stern or pig to snout. It's always this kind of folksy. You can imagine the artificially distressed wood and the artificially distressed people and the exposed iron and the bare filament bulbs and the hoppy. It's all the same.
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: I think the person who first called this—I think Dan Savage, who was the sex columnist for the Seattle local rag—after the Bush election, to be a total Gen X or millennial, he said it's not blue states and red states. It's a blue urban archipelago in a sea of red. The culture was actually going two directions. You see it everywhere.
--:-- To quote our friend Balaji, the analogy he cites: if you remember back when we had Windows machines, you would do something called defragmenting the disk. Windows is such an inefficient operating system that a single application serves its memory throughout the hard drive and it slows it down because you're reading from many places. So you have to do this thing called defragmenting. You basically write the memory back to the same place and the app would start running fast again. What he feels is happening—and of course, he believes in this thing called the network state—is that we're basically defragmenting reality.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: And what we need to solve this is take all the people that think like each other and get them back in the same state and in some sense defrag the disk. I think the realities of that are a little challenging, but it's an interesting thought experiment to imagine that if you were to do that, in some magical way, then you would end up with a holy red and a holy blue country or something.
--:-- Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, this question of how the individuation of the current attention marketplace relates to what we share and what we don't share has a bunch of really interesting questions in it. Some of which, again, like the point you were making before about finding your people on the internet. For a trans kid in a place where there's no one else like them, finding people on the internet who are going through the same thing is incredible. And that's true for a million different ways of being that you might experience as a teenager or as a young adult or as an old adult. But there is a level of individuation built into the technology and the market technology of it now, which drives towards ever more individuation, and that individuation fails in really interesting ways.
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: Can I ask you a question, Chris? Because I'm really curious about this. To me, one of the big unsolved questions that I never quite wrestled to the ground—I talk a little bit about this notion of subprime attention—is that there are sort of two different ways of looking at ad tech, to oversimplify. One is that it has all this incredibly personalized data that no advertiser has ever had access to. It's not just talking to a generic man head of household in the 50s. It's talking to you, Chris Hayes. I know where you live, what you do, what your medications are. That allows a level of sophistication and optimization that's never been possible before. And then the other side of this is that for all of that being true, it's amazing how sort of bad, schlocky, and ineffective most internet advertising is. I think there's some truth to both of them. I wrestle with them a bit in the book, but never feel resolved on the question. I'm curious how you think about that.
--:-- Chris Hayes: Yeah, no, it's a good point. It's funny. This is going to take us way back to last time when I was on your show, probably because it's probably what I was on for—the whole Cambridge Analytica scandal.
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: Exactly.
--:-- Chris Hayes: You don't need to go down the rabbit hole. It's a whole story. Everyone's probably heard as much as they want to hear about it. There's no way to do that, right? And any media buyer will tell you that a lot of ads are still crap. And it's true. It's still kind of a statistical phenomenon. Just to put numbers on it, the click-through rate—how often a user engages on a thing like Instagram—at least 97% of people who looked at it were completely indifferent to the thing. They just didn't engage.
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: Yeah, I mean, look, you can really do a technical deep dive there. Yes, that data is out there, but a lot of it's super fragmented and it often exists in varying silos. And then there is grift and bullshit, to be blunt, in advertising. People will sell you data that is not nearly as accurate as you think it is. Companies like Facebook that actually have a first-party relationship with the user often have better data for that reason. If nothing else, they have a stable notion of identity. It's the same Chris Hayes or the same Antonio that shows up on the app every time, so they kind of know. When you just show up on a website, it's based on a cookie, and that's so transient these days that it's basically meaningless. So there are a lot of practical problems. And again, it's funny—I actually did a story for Wired about it because it pissed me off so much. The whole conspiracy theory that Zuck is listening to you through your phone or whatever.
--:-- Chris Hayes: Well, so here's my question. This strikes me a lot. When you're on TikTok, TikTok is pretty ad-heavy these days. And I'm always struck that every ad feels like something from the Home Shopping Network or an infomercial that I would see at 5:30 a.m. before cartoons came on a Saturday morning in my youth. And I keep thinking to myself, why isn't Progressive Auto Insurance or GM serving me ads here if this ad tech works? Why are the people that spend the most amount of money in advertising—and for whom this is particularly true, like car brands and insurance brands where there's unbelievable continuity—people just keep the same thing? Traditionally, the younger demographics in advertising were so valuable. You want to sell someone their first Toyota because they're just going to buy Toyotas after that. You're really purchasing a lifetime of purchases. So if that's the case and young people are on TikTok, if this is such effective advertising and Detroit spends so much, why do they never get an ad there? I don't know. Maybe they're just dinosaurs and they're wrong, or maybe it's not as good. I just don't know the answer to it.
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: It's totally true. I mean, there's TikTok, there's an app called Whatnot. It's basically people stomping for a product and then buying from it. I think it works for D2C brands—very niche brands that people associate with and buy very easily. You're absolutely correct. That's the whole point of brand advertising. To use more ad tech ease, high LTV, high lifetime value. If you become a Ford buyer for the continuity of your life—Mustang, then you buy an SUV when you have a family—that's literally thousands of dollars in lifetime value. I'm not sure, to be honest. I don't know what the answer is.
--:-- Chris Hayes: Yeah, no, I don't know if it's a thing to answer. It's just so striking to me that that's the case, and particularly how much that still dominates these sort of older media. That's still when you watch a big sports game on a broadcast, if you're watching Sunday football. And there's also that scale that is very hard to replicate with TikTok. To your point about how scalable the TikTok stuff is, if you make some nifty little gizmo that you can drop ship from China and you have low overhead, you can sell it to a small number of people on TikTok. That's not the way you're going to sell a Ford F-150. So there's a sort of interesting scale question there. But I also just wonder what the next big thing is. We've seen these sort of movements from text-based to video. If there's something after that, what is the next ByteDance that does to TikTok what TikTok sort of did to the incumbents and Facebook?
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: I mean, my vote would be for AI. To frame it as a bigger thing, we're going from sort of a textual culture. I think you cite somewhere in the book that the thought that we're going to be reading a 6,000-word thought piece in the New Yorker—I doubt most young people can even do that anymore. I can barely do it, actually, even though I used to do it regularly. I've forced myself to do it, which is weird. But it doesn't mean we're going back to an oral phase in which we're going to be citing Homer in iambic pentameter. The oral phase, which Neil Postman writes about a lot, was very mnemonic. It was very memory intensive. People had these sort of recognizable tropes and forms, but they also remembered a lot. They could recite poetry. They could recite biblical verses. There was an enormous amount stored in the brain.
--:-- Chris Hayes: Yeah, I mean, I think we were at the tail end of that. I still had to memorize Shakespeare in high school, which I don't think anyone has to do anymore. But I think the oral-textual divide wasn't even about the format. It's the form of thought. And when I talk to the AI—I don't think they're human, by the way. I think everyone who thinks they're human is crazy. But I talk to it as if it were a human because that's actually the best way to interface with it. You engage in this sort of Socratic dialogue with it, trying to get an answer. Sometimes the AI bot gets crazy and hallucinates. I mean, so do humans. And you kind of have to put it back on the right course. But I think that's the thing. And when you manage to map that to e-commerce or travel, when I can say, "I want to go to France for a week in August to see my daughter and spend a week in Brittany. So book me an Airbnb, book me a flight, and make it not cost more than $3,000, and if that's impossible, just give me a button that says go and do it"—I would literally bet large portions of my net worth that that's the future. That's going to be the gateway. AI is going to upstream everything about the consumer experience.
--:-- Chris Hayes: That I totally agree with. My bigger question is what it does to dicking around on your phone. I agree that there are these very obvious use cases—incredibly useful cases—if it gets good enough, particularly the sort of agentic idea you're describing. The idea of it essentially becoming, in the way the browser was, the sort of interface that you're talking to. But that's to do all the useful stuff. My question is, what does it do when you get that screen time notification on your phone? A lot of what you're doing is not booking flights and doing stuff. Some of it is. But what it does to that part of it is the big question. I don't have the answer. I don't think anyone has the answer. I think if you had the answer, you could probably make a fortune with the right bet. But I just don't know what it's going to do there. The place we started—my wonder is if it produces a kind of brute force level of pollution that then becomes hard to manage for the platforms. Two, it gets so good that it creates this surreal new genre of pure attentional drug, like the slot machine that people just watch and doesn't have any real meaning because it's this complete neural network produced hive mind creation. Or people just opt for humans and it doesn't really change it that much anyway. Those seem like the three big options.
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: There's a paper from Yahoo Research in 2001 or 2002 in which they use the multi-arm bandit problem, which precedes advertising obviously. But then they adapt it. Because if you look at a page, there are several bandits there—different ads. And if you click on one, there's a chance of it leading to a conversion or not. A lot of the math behind this one, I forgot.
--:-- Chris Hayes: Oh, that's cool. As a side footnote, I think look at the Apple Vision as an example. It's way too bulky. It's way too expensive. It's not quite good enough yet.
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: No, and I think the thing about the Apple Vision and VR to me is—and I write about this in *Siren's Call*—at a certain point, if you're thinking about this commodity and you come up against these hard limits. At a certain point, it's like, okay, we have people looking at their phones as much as they possibly can. If we keep them awake a little longer, we can get more out of it. We start going to children. We sold the phone to everyone in the world. How do you keep expanding the frontier of the commodity to mine? And that's why VR is so important from that perspective. Because if you have it literally every second, you've just unlocked this enormous new landscape. You've discovered these new deep sea reserves that no one had before. Now, literally every second—if it's on every waking second—you can now mine that attention and extract and commodify it in a way that wasn't possible before. And because Apple did this once before with the smartphone as the crucial piece of hardware to massively expand that supply, that's the kind of commercial logic of the device, whatever it does after that.
--:-- Chris Hayes: But it's only going to be waking hours, Antonio. Sixteen hours. We're going to need full Neuralink to actually run ads inside your dreams.
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: No, literally. We're going to need the full 24.
--:-- Chris Hayes: That's the point. It's the frontiers. There's a certain rapaciousness here.
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: No, well, of course there is. I can see that the ad tech industry is completely rapacious. Towards the end of *Chaos Monkey*, in the afterward that I wrote for the second edition, I mentioned that Facebook is running out of people. I made the joke that they'd start breeding new humans just to become Facebook users to sell them ads or something, which obviously is ridiculous. But I think it's a similar concept. There are actually only so many attention hours in the day.
--:-- Chris Hayes: Yeah. And you do come up—I'm definitely not like a degrowth leftist at all. I would call myself a pro-growth left liberal. Abundance, I think is what we call them these days.
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: Abundance, Chris.
--:-- Chris Hayes: Abundance. Yes, distinct from that in some ways. But I guess my point would be there are these fundamental tensions between the need for endless growth and what boundaries you hit up against and what it does to people. You could create a company that just provided a useful service and printed money for a long time. In some ways, Google had that for a long time. They had a genuinely useful service. It genuinely transformed how we got information. It was insanely profitable. It was a money printing machine. And it wasn't enough. You have to grow it past that. And in some ways with the use of AI, the entire open web that was the basis for the first iteration of Google is collapsing underneath it. And what comes after when you talk about this sort of interface we have with the AI chatbot? I find that for my work, the only way that I can use AI is with web search on and telling it to cite everything. Because I can't risk a hallucination. So I need to check everything against—did a person report this? Did a human being go and call this person? Is that name right? And I do wonder about the surreality we're all entering into once the kind of growth revenue model collapses the open web. What is left? The stuff that's actually being used to create all that useful information—who's going to maintain that if the whole thing collapses?
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: Yeah, I think I cite Edward Abbey in *Chaos Monkey*'s epigraph in there somewhere: "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."
--:-- Chris Hayes: Right, exactly. Yes, exactly. Kind of true. I mean, yeah, it's funny. I cite *The Abundance Agenda*, which is Ezra's book that basically is telling the left, "OK, don't be dumb about capitalism and growth. It could actually be a good thing." And I think there's another book by Alex Karp of Palantir called *The Technological Republic* that's basically telling the right, "Look, the market isn't actually the solution to everything and doesn't actually necessarily tell us what is good." The summa bonum—what are the ultimate good ends of social life? The market isn't necessarily there to answer that question. I mean, I think Peter Thiel famously asked the question, "We were promised flying cars and you got 140 characters." I'll say this on that last point. It's interesting to me to compare the amount of CapEx and media attention to AI versus the kind of insane solar power revolution happening right now, because it's a little like the flying car 140 character thing. We've been burning carbon for energy before the Industrial Revolution. We've been burning trees for wood stoves, and then we got the Industrial Revolution, we've been burning fossil fuels specifically. But a world where we get to—which is totally possible now from an engineering standpoint—the marginal cost of energy basically dropping to essentially zero, where we just get the solar tech good enough that we kind of reclaim the abundance of the sun. They write about that in the book a bit. That is such a wildly revolutionary thing to happen. And partly because it's not that lucrative in the end, but also it's not that intentionally salient in the way that AI is. So you have this weird thing happening where all the cat backs, all the attention is on the future technology, the epic defining technology being AI. And I don't know if I agree with that or not. I understand why some people think that's true. I understand some of the skepticism. But it's interesting to contrast that with the fact that right now, we're in the midst of an apocalyptic transformation in how we get energy. And it's just not that sexy.
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: You didn't mention nuclear, Chris. Nuclear might have to be part of the portfolio. But I agree with you that having at the margin free intelligence and at the margin free energy is going to be nuts.
--:-- Chris Hayes: Yeah, that's right. Yes, those two things combined might be within pretty close. And obviously they're related, because the energy consumption on the compute is enormous. And you're going to need the build out. But if you got to that point, Jesus, what does that even look like?
--:-- Antonio García Martínez: Chris, I know you got to run. So thank you so much for coming on the podcast. The book is *The Siren's Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource*. Thanks so much for coming on the show. I really enjoyed that.
--:-- Chris Hayes: Thanks so much.
--:-- [Outro music begins]
--:-- Host: Thanks for listening to the a16z podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, let us know by leaving a review at ratethispodcast.com slash a16z. We've got more great conversations coming your way. See you next time. Thank you.
