AI and The War for Your Attention | Antonio Garcia Martinez and Chris Hayes from the a16z Podcast

Today, a moment of zen, we're excited to cross-post a conversation from the newly revamped A16Z podcast, featuring a discussion between Antonio Garcia Martinez and Chris Hayes of MSNBC about AI content creators and the war for your attention. Definitely make sure that you're subscribed to the A16Z podcast and have notifications on for the latest episodes, like brand new discussions with Marc Andreessen, Balaji, Sini, Vasan, Joe Lansdale, and more, all in the last week. So excited to, uh, to have you on, Chris. Um, Antonio is a longtime friend and collaborator of, uh, of mine. We have a a show. Well, Antonio, why don't you briefly introduce yourself?

Yeah, I started in adtech, I guess, in 2008, in, in attention capitalism, as Press would call it. Um, and, um, worked at 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. Um, wrote a book about that time called Chaos Monkeys, that came out in 2017. Well, yeah. Yeah. I included it in the book. Um, was a media figure, writer guy for a while. I don't know how you do it, Chris. It drove me basically crazy. And so I went back, I went back to tech. And, uh, I'm the head of that at. Antonio famously says the prize for beating, uh, Matt Glacius in the Substack rankings is, is you then become Matt Glacius, and that wasn't, uh, inspiring enough. I'm not. It's pretty funny. I'm not anti-Matt, but we were briefly among the top 10 or 15 substackers on a revenue basis circa like 2021, and he was definitely a comp. I guess him and Andrew Sin were the definitely the winners of that race. I, I'm, I feel like I will probably have more to learn from you guys than you have from me. So, I'm, I'm happy to talk and maybe I'll ask you some questions.

I, I sort of think like the whole thing is about to collapse. I think there's just a huge pollution problem, and I think that, you know, that the treatment of spam in the book is, you know, the sort of signature pollution of attention capitalism of the attention age. If it's, 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 like brute force wasteful way, there's going to be spam, right? So that's already happened in every, you know, it's happened on junk mail, it's happened on phone calls, it's happened on text, it's happened on email, but I think the idea of like AI content creation now puts that at scale for all the social media platforms. And I guess the question becomes like, is the AI social media content generated actually compelling enough that it doesn't feel like spam, and, and it just dislocates all human creators? Do people not like it, so the algorithm stops serving it up, or does it kind of overwhelm the experience in a way that starts to feel like the way that our inboxes feel? Is AI slop going to win?

Um, yeah. Is AI that's that's one way of saying like, will, will AI slop gonna win? I mean, yes and no. I mean, you're seeing it in the for you have Twitter already, right? And maybe I would think this because I, I was kind of a creator paid for my creations, I guess, to some degree, but I think a lot of it is kind of empty and sterile. And I think, I think humans who are able to be creative and use AI tools correctly will have superpowers.

Yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm pretty obsessed right now with AI slop and particularly like these sort of sub-genres that feel like, you know, what's funny about a lot of AI is that like it doesn't actually feel that sophisticated. It just feels like reverse-engineered in a way that you can trace. I mean, not all of it, right? But a some of it does, you know, there, there are moments we all have with this technology where you're like, "Oh my god." But like, for instance, it's clear that like religious themes and babies like do well, right? And so there's this whole like universe of like AI babies singing, "Bless the Lord, oh my soul." And, you know, and there was one I saw yesterday that's like Jesus with a baby. They're both singing, "Bless the Lord, oh my soul," and Jesus is holding a disembodied foot, which is like just like signature AI slop. And to me, the sort of question about all this stuff is, you know, one of the thesis of the book is that there's there's this kind of disconnect between what we will pay attention to and in some volitional sense, what we want to pay attention to. And the question is, does AI, does the, 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, it totally alienates you from the latter, what you want to pay attention to? And if it does do that, do, do people stick with it, or do they, do they reach some point where they feel too alienated from what they want to be spending their time doing?

Well, well, I think the challenge there is what you put, Chris, which by the way, I, I think I think it's time to just plug Chris's book. I think you wrote a phenomenal book, actually. Well, thanks. And I would recommend it to most of my adtech, um, people. And one of the things you cite is the, to use the, the marketing speak, acquisition and retention are different things, right? 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? And even with the guy with a gun in his hand, it might be a little hard to maintain it, right? And that, and that's the challenge. And if, if you're a sophisticated marketer, you realize it's not just about acquisition, it's about the retention side of it. And, you know, I, 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 and like like a methhead like getting into a Fenty fold on the street. Like I emerge two hours later, I come to, and like, what, what the hell just happened? And then I delete the app from my phone because I never want to do that again. Um, so that's maybe the.

No, that's that's well, first of all, thanks for the kind words. I appreciate it, especially because I'm not a, I'm not a practitioner in adtech. And, you know, so much of the story is sort of an adtech story. I mean, it's, it's, I think deeper than adtech. Adtech is sort of epiphenomenal to the story, but, but, but so it's, it's really gratifying to hear that from someone who's, who's, who's worked in it. And yeah, like I've had the exact same experience that sort of again, that, you know, the, the sort of the defining metaphor of the book, the siren's call, Odysseus on the mast, sort of, you know, trying to avoid the sirens with your sort of volitional conscious self against the kind of lulling that happens, right? And all of us in that position. But I'm just really, yeah, I, I, I think I have the same faith as you, like that fundamentally there's something irreducibly human and, um, that people are going to just rebel, basically. We'll rebel against slop. Which I think brings us back to this first question, which I do think is really interesting, which is like, if the slop overruns it, what does that mean for the platforms, right? Like, and, and is it something that they have to start actively managing in the same way that at scale somewhere like Twitter, right, they started to have to deal with a bunch of really difficult content moderation questions that were tough calls where they're trying to, you know, create a user experience that is not going to repel people and is going to attract advertisers. And I do wonder if like AI generated content becomes a set of questions like that for the, for the, for TikTok and for, you know, Reels and stuff like that at a certain point.

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We've had a slot problem before AI. I, I mentioned LinkedIn earlier in terms of how how fake that that network feels, but also on Instagram, right? Like people have Finstas, you know, fake Instagrams for for a reason. So this idea of like who you present yourself as and who who you actually are, what you actually think has been a problem with social networks for for a while. And it's not obvious to me that, um, AI will make the problem worse in terms of, um, accelerating or emphasizing either fake stuff or stuff that people don't want to be engaging with. Um, what, why are you so, um, convinced that that it will, that it will expand that gap between what we want to be engaging with and what we actually engage with?

I just think to me, it's sort of a quantity and automation question, right? One of the things about online success is that it's not a batting average. It's like your total number of hits. I mean, it's a batting average if you're like trying to make a living, right? And you only have so much time. But like, you know, Mr. Beast talks about this. Other people talk about it too. Like, it's always be posting and see what works. And sometimes you could post the same things 15 times and one time it takes off, and other times it, it doesn't. If you're thinking about it as this quantity game, right? And this is where the sort of brute force spam analogy comes in. Like, if you're automating a thousand videos every day and just throwing them at the, at the algorithm for sort of content farming purposes, you know, does that start to overwhelm everything? Um, because you can just do, you know, I can't make a thousand videos a day, but, you know, you can, you can now, right? And Antonio, to your point, like you could even imagine this not as like a slop spam thing. You could imagine it as someone who's actually pretty good, right? Like using that, that automation. It's just like, to me, the kind of 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 just wonder what, what it's going to do to the existing models for, you know, for, for these platforms.

One thing I find interesting of the impact of social media. I mean, you cite a lot of the negative impacts of social media and you cite one book, The Frenzy of Renown, that I actually started reading based on your recommendation, actually. It's a great book, isn't it?

I'm gonna be that guy. Self. I think I have a line in Chaos Monkeys that says, you know, 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. 15 people. Yeah. And the fact. It's a great line. Yeah. Yeah. And the fact that. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And the fact that everyone kind of carries themselves like they are a Kardashian everywhere they go. I mean, just as like a tourist in Europe, the fact that literally you have a line of people taking selfies in front of the thing, right, is already like people are imagining themselves already under the spotlight. And and people, and as a side thing, like I, yesterday, you know, I work at a tech company, it's very young, and I think the, the one thing the Zoomers themselves cited is that like, well, you feel like you're being observed all the time, right? Like everyone is like a celebrity who goes out in the wild. And if you yell at a waiter or you do something stupid, which we've all done, by the way, right, suddenly you, you can become Insta famous for it. And nobody wants. And I just, and again, Chris, you and I are probably old enough to remember the before times when we were young, dumb kids, if you didn't, you know, go to jail and didn't go to the hospital, it didn't happen, right? That's it. It was gone. I mean, maybe it remained as like local lore, but it never got bigger than that. You didn't weren't really worried about anything, right? And somehow that's totally changed the way that people think about themselves in the in the world.

Yeah. And I think that, you know, that the sort of one of the things I write about in the book a lot is sort of the effects of sort attention and social attention on you and what it does. And and and that democratization of fame as as a genuinely new phenomenon that's sort of different from past eras. And I think you're right, like it is behavior modifying. And I, you know, for me, I have the experience of actually, you know, again, fame is always totally relative, like, you know, different people are famous in different places, but like, you know, people recognize me on the street. I, I do, um, I do have that awareness that like, for instance, if I like screamed at a car that cut me off, you know, or like almost hit me as it was rounding the corner, and like people might know that that was me and associate with me. So like, there is that kind of behavioral modification part of it too. Um, but there's also something, you know, there's something profoundly warping about it psychologically. Um, and I think it is true that that point that you just made, though, is a really interesting one of like, there is some kind of pro-social effect, right, of like not wanting to be like a complete maniac in public because that, you know, that might go viral or something. That's is an interesting pro-social aspect of it. But I also think there's something so, um, so warping about it. And one of the things that, and I, I quote this in the book, you know, the move from public posting to group chat is I think 100% driven by that, right? So like, you know, more and more of all the traffic and and Instagram talks about this all the time is happening in private messaging, things are happening in private Facebook groups, Signal chats, WhatsApp chats, like sort of try to re basically to kind of reclaim a private space that's not public space, um, is one of the sort of bigger trends happening. I think 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.

You're totally correct. And I want to get back to the group chat things. I think towards the end of your book, you become a little bit of a doomer, Chris, but you start trying to cite solutions to the problem. And in the group chat, one is an interesting one. But I want to put, um, I want to focus on one thing you said, which is, you know, is it pro-social, right? And one of the things I noticed when I, right after I wrote Chaos Monkeys, I lived, I kid you not, on a small island in the Northwest, in what's called the San Juans, which is these beautiful islands.

I've been there. It's beautiful. Yeah. It's a cool place. Very small town. And so like the reality is everyone's kind of famous in that neighborhood, and then everyone knows who everyone kind of is and their family. And so you, if you did something totally crazy and like off the bend, you'd still catch for it to be cool. Like you wouldn't get away with it. And so a lot of our focus on privacy, in fact, this is historically true. I know this is a bit of a rabbit hole. I don't know if you want to go down here, but if you look at the history of privacy and again, Chris, I'm sure you know because you study these topics. You know, Louis Brandeis basically created in 1890 with this, you know, this sort of disquisition called The Right to Privacy that he more or less invented. By the way, the word privacy doesn't appear once in the Constitution. And the reason why is because it, 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, which again was a right that was more or less invented to cope with like urban living where you were losing this ability to actually know everybody. And anyhow, long winded up to getting to I think the group chat phenomenon, but like not not everybody can join the group chat. There's an admin, right? If someone gets like completely out of control, they get booted. And then everyone kind of knows everyone. So like, you don't really want to piss people off because like, there's typically some theme, at least in my group chats, often professional, right? Like I'm in a group chat with Eric and we're, a lot of people that have worked together or invested in each other's companies. And you can't, you can't be that much of a dick, to be blunt, because like you'll take a hit for it, right? So it's kind of self-regulating. And I think to me, if I was to propose a solution to our current bind, it's not less technology and like a rich like a, but a jihad against, you know, this thing. I think it's using technology in some way to recreate.

I, I totally agree with that. I mean, I do think the scale ends up being really the problem. I mean, the question to me is like, where is the revenue in that model? That, and this is sort of the interesting question, right? Like this is something I'm really obsessed with. And it's, it's the germ of something that I explored in the book and I'm kind of writing about now in relation to AI. Like, we tend to conflate, particularly in this era, like useful tech and lucrative tech, and those are not, like, there's, there are technologies that are incredibly useful that are not particularly lucrative, like penicillin, right? Now, like antibiotics are not, it's not, no one's making enormous fortunes off them. Even solar power, which is arguably the most useful technology of our age, um, is a perfectly profitable enterprise, but no one's making like, you know, Rockefeller fortunes off of solar right now. And then there's tech technologies that are incredibly lucrative, but not particularly socially useful, like the FanDuel DraftKings tech is like really good tech, like, and it works really well, but it's not like particularly useful, particularly compared to penicillin. And one of the things I think that ends up happening in a, 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 revenue or a business model. And so this question of like, well, what's right? So what's the sort of sustaining business model of the group chat? Um, is, is an interesting one. Now, obviously WhatsApp, which Meta owns, is, you know, incredibly valuable company. I mean, incredibly valuable division of Meta. Their Signal, which 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 the sort of reclaiming kind of community or reclaiming like Dunbar's number, or IRL reactions, or what I, what I, what I say in the book is that the normal, normal relationships are born of bilateral exchanges of social attention, right? As opposed to unilateral, right? That's, that's the way that's the way we're all conditioned to work. And the question is, can you do that at, you know, is that a, it's not a particularly lucrative tech to reclaim. And that, to me, is the question of like, is there some fundamental tension here between what the sort of revenue model incentives are and what the tech is best for us as people, or whatever.

I mean, one take on that, Chris, I mean, just to give you the view from the crypto trenches, because I work at a crypto company. Um, there actually are group chats that 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, not most Americans don't use, certainly. And there, you actually either pay to enter the group chat, or some apps have actually literally tokenized being able to go into the group chat. So you have to buy so many of the token, and then the, the owner of the group chat, who's the guy who's leaking the alpha, because this is all very speculative, right? The token represents his value. There's a company called FTE that was short-lived. I was part of it for a while, and I had a channel, and you could buy the, the AGM token and you could join the group as part of it. It, it like, but, you know, 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, right? It makes everything, you know, AI is everything is computer, and crypto, like everything money, like literally everything. Um, but like, yeah, I agree with you. I mean, one, one place I'd maybe quibble with you a little bit, or I guess I don't know, I'm confused myself. I think the world we're heading to, the digital version of things is kind of like the mainstream premium economy version of the world. And then I think our friend, uh, Mark, and that you might know, Eric, um, his is the A and the sign behind, you know, famously said that some people are reality privileged, right? Some people are wealthy enough or live in a certain context in which they don't need the VR headset, right? Because like their life is good enough, they don't need it. But everyone else gets the, the VR headset. And so how do you strike that balance between the digital versus the, the real versions of it? But I think what happens is, and again, I think it's, it's the subtext for your entire book, Chris, who we interact with, who we agree with, is completely uncoupled from our actual physical place in the world. And I think that, that tension between the physical and the, and the, I wouldn't say spiritual necessarily, but the intellectual is, is, is at the heart of all. I, I think the nation state is kind of cracking up in a way, just to get doomer for a hot second. And 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, for example, used to create during the Cronkite era, used to have some some level of like, you know, synchrony or synergy that would happen with Cronkite saying, and that's the way it is. And somehow now I scroll my feed versus blue sky, and it's like, no, I, I don't know what the way it is actually the way it is.

What's really interesting too, is to think about it from the, from the, from it being the opposite problem, because so much of what happens in sort of the 20s and 30s, particularly when you have these sort of huge mass, um, mass broadcast mediums that can sort of capture and can capture attention at scale, right? Is that you, you have sort of this opposite problem, right? Which is like the, the, the problem of like the mass media and, and this kind of, you know, this, this is something that Lippmann encounters when he's has a job basically propagandizing for entrance into World War I. Um, which is that, whoa, this is an insanely powerful tool, and you can blast out messages at scale to all these people and get them all thinking the same way, or, you know, moving the needle in some way. And that was a, a problem that, you know, Lippmann wrestles with, and all sorts of different folks wrestle with. And now we have kind of the opposite problem, right? Which is that like, there is no, like getting anything like that. I mean, I even feel, I've even come to feel, you know, one way to think about a public is paying attention to the same thing together. And I've even come to feel like weirdly old man nostalgic for like the Super Bowl, or when everyone's talking about Love Island, because it feels like, oh, here's a thing that everyone is paying. I, I'm not watching Love Island, but I know that everyone is. And I, I find some weird comfort in that. I mean, I think it's so funny because I think 20 or 30 years ago, this was so, you know, particularly if you're Gen X and you thought of yourself as sort of, you know, alternative in whatever way that like that was stalifying, you know, mass culture and middlebrow. But I've, I've come to kind of miss that because I think it's the thing that, you know, it is the thing we're sort of missing, which is everyone, football is really the only thing left that sort of everyone pays attention to together. Um, the elections. Yeah. And elections, although we pay attention in such different ways, you know, but like, I do think there's something, Yeah. There's something lost in that. And I don't know, kind of how to get a background. And, and I'm also fully aware it might just be like, I'm 46 and I like, you know, I'm just succumbing to the nostalgia of middle age.

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What was the last sort of like literary event that like every American paid attention to? And and my vote is for like Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections that came out.

I was literally going to say Franzen and The Corrections, and then like the whole thing. Yeah. Right. Every everyone had. It's a great book, by the way. I like Fran as a writer. Everyone had to read that damn book. And since then, it's, it's never been the case that everyone's read the same book at all.

Yeah. I mean, with the possible exception of David Foster Wallace and Infinite Jest, but, but it's one of those books everyone claims to read, but no one's actually read. I think people actually did read The Corrections. And yeah, it's weird because if you talk to, if you talk to like Gen Xers, and particularly I think people like again, Mark, who came from maybe not like core mainstream America, what they always say about the internet is like, "Oh, I finally found my people." Like, I was interested in whatever some weird little niche obsession that in your little Midwestern town, there's nobody doing it. Although what's also interesting to me too, and I'm always curious about the tech, I feel like I don't have a great sense actually of like, and maybe you guys have a better sense of this, like I think, a, it's very funny, we refer to the algorithm as like a definite article, like it's like sort of totemic or kind of almost like a deity, like the algorithm served me this or the, like, and it's always just unclear to me like 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 like that. It's like, that is, I, I probably could have coded that, like that's not, that's not that impressive. It's not like that sophisticated. Sometimes it does find things where I'm like, oh, wow, there's something interesting happening here. I write about in the book, like taking a gummy and like realizing that it's just showing me, you know, pictures of sandwiches, and after like 30 minutes of just looking, it's like, oh, it knows that I'm high. Like, that's that's a kind of magic. But I do wonder, one of the things I think is interesting is there will be these kinds of things that go viral or have this kind of like algorithmic resonance that everyone is then talking about or everyone does, you know, particularly in Gen Z, like reference, or even the way that people talk, like this sort of brain rot, you know, Gen Z way of talking is really interesting to me, because that does seem recognizably mass, right? In the same way the 1960s it was like far out and groovy, and all these things that like, there is this really distinct argot of Gen Z, but they're getting it all not from mass culture, but from basically 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.

Yeah, I forget what it was. I was meant they visited Ireland recently and, uh, visited family, and the kids, the exact same, uh, argot in the US versus if you had visited Ireland 20 years ago, it would have been, you wouldn't be able to understand them because they spoke dialect that would be unintelligible to American ears. And you see that actually in the US. I mean, this is the thing that I'm really obsessed with too, in the US. Like, one of the things that's really fascinating is the, the lack of sort of geographical distinction in geographical cultures. You're starting to see this, like this shows up in politics, right? Which is that like, it used to be the case that rural Mississippi and rural Minnesota just voted very, very differently. And that's because the people that occupied those places had different, um, ethnic backgrounds. In Minnesota, it was like Scandinavian socialists, but also different religious traditions, Southern Baptist and, you know, versus Lutheran. And there were all these like, this defining sort of geographic features of different places that would show up in politics. And increasingly, there is this kind of homogenization happening where, you know, all sort of rural folks of certain demographics, more and more vote like each other, and also kind of like listen to the same music and have the same kind of omni-culture. And that's also true of sort of big city, you know, college-educated and, um, upper middle class folks, where like you could go to like the cool neighborhood in Columbus, and there's going to be some restaurant called like Stern and Stem, that you know, serves, uh, you know, whatever, like farm-to-table gastropub food, and like this is sort of like, it's interesting that these sort of omni-cultures, you supplant localism in, in this, in this moment when we don't have massness as the sort of central cultural feature.

The place is called Pine and Spruce in Seattle, but it's exactly what you're saying, and it's exactly right. It's called, it's all called stem to stern or pictus now. It's always this kind of folksy, and you can already imagine the distressed wood, the artificially distressed wood, and the artificially distressed people, and the exposed iron, and the, and the bare filament bulbs, and the hoppy, you know, it's all the, it's all the same. But it, I think the person who first called this, by the way, I think Dan Savage, who was like the sex columnist or whatever for like, whatever the Seattle local rag was in the after the Bush election, to be a total Gen X or millennial, he said, "It's not blue states and and red states. It's like a blue urban archipelago and a sea of red," and that the culture was actually going in two directions. And you see it everywhere. But this is, I mean, again, to quote our friend Abology, the analogy he cites, um, if you remember what back when we had Windows machines, you would do something called defragmenting the disk. And what that means is Windows is such an is such an inefficient operating system that a single application sort of its memory throughout the hard drive, and then it slows it down because you're reading from many places. So you'd have to do this thing called defragmenting that would basically write the memory back to the same place that the app would start running fast again. And so what he feels is happening, and of course he believes in this thing called the network state, is that we're basically defragmenting reality, right? And what we need to solve this is take all the people that that think like each other and get them back in the same state and in some sense defrag the disc. 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, right, in some magical way, then you would end up with a holy red and a holy blue country, or something.

Yeah, I mean, this this question of like, what sort of how the sort of individuation of the current attention marketplace and what how it relates to what we share and what we don't share is like, there, there's just a bunch of really interesting questions in there. Some of which, you know, again, some of which again, like the point you were making before about like, I found my people on the internet. Like, you know, for, for a trans kid, right, who's in a place where there's no one else like them, to find on the internet people that are going through this is like the most, it's incredible, right? So like, there are all these, and, and that's true for a million different ways of being that you might be, um, as a, you know, as a teenager, or, or as a young adult, or as an old adult, right? But there is a level of individuation built into the technology and into the market technology of it now, um, which is how it's all, you know, drives towards ever more individuation. But that individuation fails in interesting ways.

Can I, can I ask you a question, Antonio, because I'm, I'm really curious about this. So, 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 like subprime attention, is like there's sort of two different ways of looking at adtech. To oversimplify, one is that it, it's, it has all this incredibly personalized data that no advertiser has ever had access to. It's not just talking to a generic, you know, man head of household in the 50s. It's talking to like, you, Chris Hayes, I know where you live and what you do and how much you make and what your medications are, right? Or like, you know, that that allows it a level of sophistication and optimization that's never been possible before. And then the other side of this is like, for all of that being true, it's amazing how sort of bad, schlocky, and ineffective most internet advertising is. And I think there's some truth to both of them. And I kind of wrestle with them a bit in the book, but never feel like resolved on the question. I'm curious what, how you think about that.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, it's, it's a good point. I mean, it's, it's funny. This is going to take us way back, back when last time when I was on your show, probably because it's probably what I was on for the whole Cambridge Analytica scandal. You don't need to, we 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, any media buyer will tell you that 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, you know, the, the CTR, the click-through rate, like how often a user engages on a thing like Instagram, at least 97% of people who looked at it were just completely indifferent to the thing, right? And just didn't engage.

Yeah. I mean, look, you can really do a technical deep dive there. I mean, yes, that data is out there, but a lot of it's super fragmented, and it doesn't, it often exists in varying silos, and then there's drift. And to be blunt, in advertising, Google will sell you data that's not nearly as accurate as you think it is. I mean, companies like Facebook that actually do have a first-party relationship with the user often have better data for that reason. And 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, if you just jump on a website, it's based on a cookie, and that's so transient these days that it's basically meaningless. Um, so there's just a lot of practical problems. Like, and again, I, it's funny, I actually did a story for Wired about it because it pissed me off so much. You know, the whole conspiracy theory that Zuck is listening to you through your phone or whatever. I think not to go into a total detour.

Well, so here's here's my question. This this strikes me a lot. So, when you're on TikTok, right? TikTok has gotten is pretty ad-heavy these days. Um, and I'm always struck that like, every ad feels like something from like the Home Shopping Network or like a, like an infomercial I would see at 6, like 5:30 AM before cartoons came on on a Saturday morning in my youth, which is, and, and I just, I keep thinking to myself, I'm like, why isn't Progressive Auto Insurance or GM serving me ads here if this ad tech works? Like, the, the, the people that spend like the most amount of money on advertising, and for whom particularly this is particularly true for brands like car brands and insurance brands, where you know, there's unbelievable continuity, right? People just keep the same thing. And that's why like traditionally, right, 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. So you're really kind of purchasing a lifetime of purchases. So if that's the case, and young people are in TikTok, it's, if this is such effective advertising, and and Detroit spends like, why are they not, why do they never get an ad there? And I, I don't know. Maybe they're just dinosaurs and they're wrong, or maybe it's not as good. But I, I just don't know the answer to it.

Yeah, I don't. I mean, it's totally true. I mean, there's, there's TikTok. There's an app called Whatnot. I mean, it's basically people stumping for a product and then buying from it. I think it works for D2C brands, right? Very niche brands that people associate with and buy very easily. I mean, you're absolutely correct that that's the whole point of brand advertising, right? Again, to use more adtechies, high LTV, high lifetime value, right? If you're, if you become a Ford buyer for the continuity of your life and your Mustang, and you buy an SUV when you have a family, that's literally kind of lifetime value, you know? I'm not, I'm not sure to be honest. I don't know what the answer is.

Yeah. No, no, I, I, I don't know if it's, I, I don't know if it's like a, a thing to answer. Just like it's so striking to me that that's the case, and particularly how much that still dominates these sort of older media, um, that, you know, that still when you watch a big sports game on a, you know, broadcast, if you're watching Sunday football, right? And they're also, that's scale that is very hard to replicate with TikTok. To your point about how scalable the TikTok stuff is, is like, if you make some like nifty little gizmo that you can drop ship from China and you have low overhead, you can sell it to like a small number of people on TikTok. That's not the way you're going to sell a, you know, um, a Ford F-150. So, there's there's a sort of interesting scale question there. But I, I also just wonder like, what the next, basically we have seen, you know, we've seen these sort of movements of, um, from text-based to video, and if there's something after that, like what, basically what the next big thing is. It, you know, what, what is the next ByteDance that does to TikTok what TikTok sort of did to the incumbents and Facebook and stuff like that? I mean, my vote would be for AI to frame it as a bigger thing, right? We're going from sort of a textual culture. I think you said somewhere in the book that like, the thought that we're going to be reading, you know, a 6,000-word thought piece in the New Yorker, like, I, I doubt most people can even do that anymore. I, I can barely do it actually, even though I used to do it regularly. I've like forced myself to do it. Uh, 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 or something, right? Because that was very, that was very people, the oral phase, which which Neil Postman writes about a lot, you know, that was very mnemonic, right? It was very memory intensive. People had these sort of, um, these recognizable tropes and forms, but they also remembered a lot. They knew they could recite.

Poetry, they could recite biblical verses. There was an enormous amount stored in, in, you know, in the brain. Yeah. And, and I mean, I think we were at the tail end of that. I still had to memorize that in high school, which I, not anymore. But I think the oral textual divide wasn't even about the format. It's the form of thought, right?

And when I talk to the AI, it's like I'm having, I, I don't think they're human, by the way. I think everyone who thinks they're human is crazy. But I, I talk to it as if it were a human because that's actually the best way to interface with it. And you engage in this sort of, you know, Socratic dialogue with it, trying to get an answer. Sometimes the AI bot, you know, 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, right? And, and talking to the human. And, and when you manage to map that to like e-commerce or travel, when I can say, I want to go, which I do go to France for a week in August to see my daughter and spend a week in Britain. So book me an Airbnb, book me a flight, and make it not cost more than $3,000 if that's possible, and just give me a button that says, "Go and do it." That's, I think, I, I mean, I, I would literally bet large portions might not be worth in time, but that's the future. But that's going to be the gateway. That's, that's how they're AI is going to upstream everything about consumer experience. That I totally agree with.

My, my bigger question is what it does to like, around on your phone. Like, like there, like I, I agree. I agree that there are, there are these very obvious to me use cases, incredibly useful cases of if it gets good enough that particularly the sort of agentic idea that you're describing there. Like there's, there's lots of stuff. And, and the idea of it essentially becoming in the way the browser was, like the sort of interface being the thing that you're talking to, right? But that's to do all the useful stuff, right? Like my question is like, what does it do? Like when you get that screen time notification on your phone, right? Like what you're doing is, you're looking, a lot of it is not booking flights and doing stuff. Some of it is, but what it does to that part of it is is sort of the big, I, I don't have the answer. I don't think anyone has the answer. I think if you had the answer, you could, you know, probably make a fortune with the right bet. But I just don't know what that, what it's going to do there.

The, the place we started, which is my wonder if it produces a kind of brute force level of pollution that then actually becomes hard to manage for the platforms. Two, it produces, it gets so good that it, it kind of creates this kind of surreal new genre of like pure attentional drug, like the slot machine that like people just watch and doesn't have any like real meaning because it's just the, it's just this complete like 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.

There's a paper from Yahoo Research in like 2001 or two or something in which they use the multi-armed bandit problem, which precedes advertising obviously, but then they adapt it because if you look at a page, there's several bandits there, right? Which different, different ads. And if you click on one, there's a chance of it leading to a conversion or not. And a lot of the math behind this, one I forgot is that just as a side footnote, I think look at the Apple Vision, for example, as an example, right? It's like way too bulky, it's way too expensive, it's not quite good enough yet. No. And I think, and I mean, the, the thing about the Apple Vision and VR are to me is, and I write, I, I write at some length in, in Siren's Call about this, like at a certain point, right? If you're thinking about this commodity and you come up against these hard limits, right? So 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 can go, we sold a phone to everyone in the world. Like, how do you keep expanding the frontier of the commodity to mine? And that's why VR is so important from that because if you have it literally every second, you've just unlocked this enormous new landscape of like, you've discovered these like new deep sea reserves, right? That that no one had before. Then now every, literally every second, right? If if it's on every waking second, you can now mine that attention in a way that, you know, and extract and commodify it in a way that wasn't before. Like, because Apple did this once before with the smartphone as the crucial piece of hardware to massively expand that supply. Like that, that's, that's I think the, the kind of commercial, um, logic of of the device, right? Whether whatever it does after that.

Well, it's, but it's only going to be waking hours, Chris. 16 hours. We're going to need full Neuralink to actually put run ads inside your dreams. Actually, we're going to need, we're going to need the full 24. Um, the point, right? It's like the frontiers like are, you know, there's a certain rapaciousness here. No. Well, of course there is. And I, I can see that the ad tech industry is completely rapacious. Towards the end of Chaos Monkeys, I think in the like afterward that I wrote in the second edition or whatever it was, I mentioned that like Facebook is running out of people. Right. Exactly. Like 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 that they're like, there's actually only so many attention hours in the day, right? Yeah. And you, and you do come up, you know, I'm, I'm definitely not like a, I'm not a, um, I'm definitely not like a degrowth leftist at all. Um, I would call myself like a progrowth left liberal. Um, abundance, I think is what we call it these days. Abundance, Chris. Abundance. Yes. Distinct from that in some ways. But, but, but, but, but I guess my point would be there are these fundamental tensions between the need for endless growth and like what, you know, what boundaries you, you hit up against and what it does to people. And, you know, you could create a company that was just provided a useful service and printed money for a long time. And, and in some ways, Google had that for a long time. Like they had a genuinely useful service. It genuinely transformed how we got information. It was insanely profitable. It printed, it was a money printing machine. And it wasn't enough, right? Like you have to grow it past that. And in some ways, with the use of AI, like, you know, the, the entire open web that was the basis for the first iteration of Google is collapsing underneath it. And, you know, what it, what comes after when you talk about this sort of interface we have with the AI chatbot, like, you know, I find that when I, for my work, the only way that I can use AI is with web, with web search on and telling it to cite everything because I can't risk a hallucination. Like, and so what I need to do is like, I need to check everything against like, did a person report this? Did a human being go and call this person? Is that name right? And I do wonder like the sort of hyper, the surreality that we're all entering into once the kind of growth revenue model collapses, the open web, like what, you know, what is left? The stuff that's actually being used to create all that useful information, who's going to maintain that if if the whole thing collapses?

Yeah, I think I cite Edward Abbey and Gary Snyder's epigraph in there somewhere that "growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell," right? Exactly. Yes. Exactly. Kind of true. I mean, yeah, it's funny. I, I cite the abundance agenda, which, you know, is Ezra and Derek's book that basically is telling the left, okay, don't be dumb about capitalism and growth. Like, it could actually be a good thing, right? And I think there's another book by Alex Karp of, uh, of Palantir called The Technological Republic that's basically telling the right, look, I mean, the market doesn't actually isn't actually the solution to everything and doesn't actually necessarily tell us what is good. The sum bonum, like what are the ultimate good ends of of social life? The market isn't necessarily there to answer that question. I mean, I think Peter Thiel famously asked, you know, asked the question, "We're promised flying cars and we got 140 characters." I, I'll say this on that last 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. Like we've been burning carbon for energy, you know, before the Industrial Revolution, right? Like we've been burning trees for wood stoves and, and then we got the Industrial Revolution and we've been burning fossil fuels specifically. But a world where we get to, which is totally possible now, I think from an engineering standpoint, of like the marginal cost of energy basically dropping to essentially zero, where we just get the solar tech good enough that we, we kind of reclaim the, the abundance, to use a word, of the sun. They, they write about that in the book a bit. Like that is such a wildly revolutionary thing to happen and it just is not as like, it doesn't get the, it partly because it's not that lucrative, I think, in the end, but also it's not that intentionally salient in the way that AI is. And so you do have this weird thing happening, which is like all the capbacks, all the attention is like, the future technology, the epic defining technology is going to be AI. And I, I don't know if I agree with that or not. I understand why people, some people think that's true. I understand some of the skepticism. But it's interesting to contrast that with the fact that like right now we're in the midst of an apocalyptic transformation in how we get energy, and it's just like not that sexy.

You didn't mention nuclear, Chris. Nuclear math to be part of part of the portfolio. But I, but I agree with you that having basically at the margin free intelligence and at the margin free energy is going to be nut. Yeah, that's right. That yes, that those two things combined like might be like within like pretty close. And obviously they're related, right? Because the energy consumption on the compute is enormous. Yeah. And, and you need the, you you're going to need the buildout. Um, but if you got to that point, it's like, Jesus, what does that even look like? I don't know.

Chris, Chris, I, I know you got to run. So, thank you so much for coming on on 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. Thanks so much. Hey everyone, Eric here at Turpentine. We're building the first media outlet for tech people by tech people. We're the network behind the show you're listening to right now. We have a slate of hit shows across a range of topics and industries, from our AI and investing cluster of podcasts to shows that drive the conversation in tech with the most interesting thinkers, founders, investors, and influencers, like Econ 102 with Noah Smith. We're launching new shows every week, and we're looking for industry-leading sponsors.