Learn. Share. Evolve…

0:00:05 Humans who are able to be creative and use AI tools correctly will have superpowers.
0:00:11 Does AI so ruthlessly optimize for that former, what you will pay attention to?
0:00:15 It totally alienates you from the latter, what you want to pay attention to.
0:00:18 Acquisition and retention are different things, right?
0:00:24 It’s amazing how sort of bad, schlocky, and ineffective most internet advertising is.
0:00:28 I would literally bet large portions of my net worth in time, that’s the future.
0:00:29 That’s going to be the gig.
0:00:31 AI is going to upstream everything about the consumer experience.
0:00:36 We’re in the midst of an apocle transformation in how we get energy.
0:00:39 And it’s just not that sexy.
0:00:43 We’re not all going to be famous for 15 minutes, we’re all going to be famous to 15 people.
0:00:44 15 people, yeah.
0:00:51 In a world where everyone is famous to 15 people, what happens when AI starts generating content for all of them?
0:00:56 In this episode, I’m joined by author and MSNBC host, Chris Hayes,
0:01:02 and longtime ad tech operator and writer, Antonio Garcia Martinez, to talk about the shifting economics of attention.
0:01:06 How we got here, what’s breaking, and what AI might make worse.
0:01:12 Chris’s new book, The Siren’s Call, is about the way our attention has been bought, sold, and overwhelmed.
0:01:17 Together, we explore the rise of AI slop, whether platforms can contain it,
0:01:22 and what comes next as digital content, fame, and identity get increasingly fragmented.
0:01:23 Let’s get into it.
0:01:30 As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only.
0:01:33 Should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice,
0:01:35 or be used to evaluate any investment or security,
0:01:40 and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund.
0:01:45 Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast.
0:01:48 For more details, including a link to our investments,
0:01:53 please see A16Z.com forward slash disclosures.
0:01:58 So excited to have you on, Chris.
0:02:02 Antonio is a longtime friend and collaborator of mine.
0:02:02 We have a show.
0:02:04 Antonio, why don’t you briefly introduce yourself?
0:02:08 Yeah, I started in ad tech, I guess, in 2008, in attention capitalism, as Chris would call it,
0:02:10 and worked in a number of startups.
0:02:15 I was an early member of the Facebook ads team back before the IPO when the ad system was horrible.
0:02:18 For those old enough to remember, I suspect Chris is probably in the same bucket.
0:02:21 Facebook ads used to be these little postage stamps on the right-hand side,
0:02:24 and then they became this huge money machine.
0:02:27 Read a book about that time called Chaos Monkeys that came out in 2016.
0:02:28 I’ve read it.
0:02:28 I’ve read it well.
0:02:29 Yeah, yeah.
0:02:30 Quote it in the book.
0:02:32 Was a media figure writer guy for a while.
0:02:33 I don’t know how you do it, Chris.
0:02:34 It drove me basically crazy.
0:02:35 And so I went back to tech.
0:02:37 And I’m ahead of ads.
0:02:44 Antonio famously says the prize for beating Matt Iglesias in the Substack rankings is you
0:02:46 then become Matt Iglesias, and that wasn’t inspiring enough.
0:02:54 I’m not anti-Matt, but we were briefly among the top 10 or 15 Substackers on a revenue basis
0:02:58 circa like 2021, and he was definitely a comp, I guess.
0:03:00 Him and Andrew Sullivan were definitely the winners of that race.
0:03:03 I feel like I would probably have more to learn from you guys than you have from me,
0:03:06 so I’m happy to talk and maybe I’ll ask you some questions.
0:03:10 I sort of think like the whole thing is about to collapse.
0:03:12 I think there’s just a huge pollution problem.
0:03:18 And I think that the treatment of spam in the book is the sort of signature pollution of attention
0:03:20 capitalism of the attention age.
0:03:28 If it’s lucrative to aggregate lots of attention, where attention pools and collects, there will
0:03:28 be money.
0:03:36 And to the extent that you can cheaply automate the extraction of that attention, even if it’s
0:03:41 done in a sort of like brute force wasteful way, there’s going to be spam, right?
0:03:46 So it’s happened on junk mail, it’s happened on phone calls, it’s happened on text, it’s
0:03:47 happened on email.
0:03:54 But I think the idea of AI content creation now puts that at scale for all the social media
0:03:55 platforms.
0:04:02 And I guess the question becomes like, is the AI social media content generated actually
0:04:07 compelling enough that it doesn’t feel like spam and it just dislocates all human creators?
0:04:09 Do people not like it?
0:04:11 So the algorithmic stops serving it up?
0:04:16 Or does it overwhelm the experience in a way that starts to feel like the way that our inboxes
0:04:17 feel?
0:04:18 Is AI slop going to win?
0:04:21 Yeah, that’s one way of saying like, is AI slop going to win?
0:04:22 I mean, yes and no.
0:04:24 I mean, you’re seeing it in the 4U tab Twitter already, right?
0:04:28 And maybe I would think this because I was creator paid for my creations, I guess, to some
0:04:28 degree.
0:04:30 But I think a lot of it is empty and sterile.
0:04:35 And I think humans who are able to be creative and use AI tools correctly will have superpowers.
0:04:39 Yeah, I mean, I’m pretty obsessed right now with AI slop and particularly like these sort
0:04:44 of sub genres that feel like what’s funny about a lot of AI is that it doesn’t actually
0:04:45 feel that sophisticated.
0:04:48 It just feels like reverse engineered in a way that you can trace.
0:04:50 I mean, not all of it, right?
0:04:51 But some of it does.
0:04:53 There are moments we all have with this technology where you’re like, oh, my God.
0:04:59 But like, for instance, it’s clear that like religious themes and babies like do well, right?
0:05:05 And so there’s this whole like universe of AI babies singing, bless the Lord, oh, my soul.
0:05:09 And there was one I saw yesterday that’s like Jesus with a baby.
0:05:11 They’re both singing, bless the Lord, oh, my soul.
0:05:16 And Jesus is holding a disembodied foot, which is just like signature AI slop.
0:05:22 To me, the sort of question about all this stuff is one of the theses of the book is that there’s
0:05:27 this kind of disconnect between what we will pay attention to and in some volitional sense what
0:05:28 we want to pay attention to.
0:05:35 And the question is, does AI from the generative perspective and AI from the machine learning
0:05:41 algorithmic perspective so ruthlessly optimize for that former what you will pay attention
0:05:41 to?
0:05:46 It totally alienates you from the latter, what you want to pay attention to.
0:05:51 And if it does do that, do people stick with it or do they reach some point where they feel
0:05:53 too alienated from what they want to be spending their time doing?
0:05:57 Well, I think the challenge there is what you put, Chris, which, by the way, I think it’s
0:05:58 time to just plug Chris’s book.
0:06:00 I think you wrote a phenomenal book, actually.
0:06:00 Well, thanks.
0:06:03 And I would recommend it to all my tech people.
0:06:07 And one of the things you cite is the to use the marketing speak acquisition and retention
0:06:08 are different things, right?
0:06:10 It’s one thing to acquire attention.
0:06:13 I think you cite the example of someone going into a room and firing a gun in the air.
0:06:15 Well, you’ve acquired attention, but then how do you maintain it?
0:06:18 And even with the guy with a gun in his hand, it might be a little hard to maintain it,
0:06:18 right?
0:06:19 And that’s the challenge.
0:06:22 And if you’re a sophisticated marketer, you realize it’s not just about acquisition.
0:06:23 It’s about the retention side of it.
0:06:24 I don’t know.
0:06:28 A positive side of me thinks humans aren’t going to sit there and stare at the slop all
0:06:28 day.
0:06:32 That said, I’ve used TikTok and like a meth head, like getting into a Fenty fold on the
0:06:33 street.
0:06:36 Like I emerged two hours later, I come to you and what the hell just happened?
0:06:39 And then I delete the app from my phone because I never want to do that again.
0:06:39 Yeah.
0:06:41 So that’s maybe the counter argument.
0:06:43 Well, first of all, thanks for the kind words.
0:06:47 I appreciate it, especially because I’m not a practitioner in ad tech and so much of the
0:06:48 story is sort of an ad tech story.
0:06:53 I mean, I think deeper than ad tech, ad tech is sort of epiphenomenal to the story.
0:06:56 So it’s really gratifying to hear that from someone who’s worked in it.
0:06:58 And yeah, like I’ve had the exact same experience.
0:07:04 Again, the sort of the defining metaphor of the book, the sirens call Odysseus on the
0:07:09 mast, sort of trying to avoid the sirens with your sort of volitional conscious self against
0:07:11 the kind of lulling that happens.
0:07:11 Right.
0:07:16 And all of us in that position, but I’m just really, yeah, I think I have the same
0:07:25 faith as you that fundamentally there’s something irreducibly human and that people are going
0:07:25 to just rebel.
0:07:29 Basically, we’ll rebel against slop, which I think brings us back to this first question,
0:07:32 which I do think is really interesting, which is if the slop overruns it, what does that mean
0:07:33 for the platforms?
0:07:34 Right.
0:07:39 And is it something that they have to start actively managing in the same way that at scale
0:07:44 somewhere like Twitter, right, they started to have to deal with a bunch of really difficult
0:07:51 content moderation questions that were tough calls where they’re trying to create a user
0:07:54 experience that is not going to repel people and is going to attract advertisers.
0:07:59 And I do wonder if AI generated content becomes a set of questions like that for TikTok and
0:08:01 for reels and stuff like that at a certain point.
0:08:03 We’ve had a slop problem before AI, right?
0:08:08 I mentioned LinkedIn earlier in terms of how fake that network feels, but also an Instagram,
0:08:08 right?
0:08:11 Like people have Finstas, fake Instagrams for a reason.
0:08:15 So this idea of who you present yourself as and who you actually are, what you actually think
0:08:17 has been a problem with social networks for a while.
0:08:25 And it’s not obvious to me that AI will make the problem worse in terms of accelerating or
0:08:32 emphasizing either fake stuff or stuff that people don’t want to be engaging with.
0:08:36 Why are you so convinced that it will expand that gap between what we want to be engaging
0:08:37 with and what we actually engage with?
0:08:40 I just think to me, it’s sort of a quantity and automation question, right?
0:08:45 Like one of the things about online success is that it’s not a batting average.
0:08:46 It’s like your total number of hits.
0:08:49 I mean, it’s a batting average if you’re like trying to make a living, right?
0:08:50 And you only have so much time.
0:08:51 But Mr. Beast talks about this.
0:08:52 Other people talk about it too.
0:08:56 Like always be posting and see what works.
0:09:00 And sometimes you could post the same things 15 times and one time it takes off and other
0:09:01 times it doesn’t.
0:09:03 If you’re thinking about it as this quantity game, right?
0:09:06 And this is where the sort of brute force spam analogy comes in.
0:09:11 If you’re automating a thousand videos every day and just throwing them at the algorithm
0:09:16 for sort of content farming purposes, does that start to overwhelm everything?
0:09:23 Because you can just do, I can’t make a thousand videos a day, but you know, you can now, right?
0:09:27 And Antonio, to your point, like you could even imagine this not as like a slop spam thing.
0:09:30 You could imagine it as someone who’s actually pretty good, right?
0:09:32 Using that automation.
0:09:34 It’s just to me, the kind of brute force scale issue.
0:09:38 Maybe it never comes up, but it just seems to me like I’m starting to see it crop up
0:09:43 and just wonder what it’s going to do to the existing models for these platforms.
0:09:47 One thing I find interesting of the impact of social media, I mean, you cite a lot of the
0:09:50 negative impacts of social media and you cite one book, The Frenzy of Renown, that I actually
0:09:52 started reading based on your recommendation, actually.
0:09:53 It’s a great book, isn’t it?
0:09:55 I’m going to be that guy so quick.
0:09:58 But I think I have a line in Chaos Monkeys that says, Andy Warhol was wrong.
0:10:00 In the future, we’re not all going to be famous for 15 minutes.
0:10:02 We’re all going to be famous to 15 people.
0:10:03 15 people, yeah.
0:10:04 It’s a great line.
0:10:04 Yeah, yeah.
0:10:08 And the fact that everyone carries themselves like they are a Kardashian everywhere they
0:10:09 go.
0:10:13 I mean, just as like a tourist in Europe, the fact that literally you have a line of people
0:10:18 taking selfies in front of the thing, right, is already like people are imagining themselves
0:10:19 already under the spotlight.
0:10:22 And as a side thing, like yesterday, I work at a tech company.
0:10:23 It’s very young.
0:10:26 And I think the one thing the Zoomers themselves cited is that like, well, you feel like you’re
0:10:27 being observed all the time, right?
0:10:29 Everyone is like a celebrity who goes out in the wild.
0:10:33 And if you yell at a waiter or you do something stupid, which we’ve all done, by the way,
0:10:36 right, suddenly you can become into famous for it and nobody wants that.
0:10:40 And I just, and again, Chris, you and I are probably old enough to remember that four times
0:10:44 when we were young, dumb kids, if you didn’t go to jail and didn’t go to the hospital, it
0:10:45 didn’t happen, right?
0:10:46 That’s it.
0:10:46 It was gone.
0:10:50 I mean, maybe it remains as like local lore, but it never got bigger than that.
0:10:52 You weren’t really worried about anything, right?
0:10:57 And somehow that’s totally changed the way that people think about themselves in the world.
0:10:57 Yeah.
0:11:00 And I think one of the things I write about in the book a lot is sort of the effects of social
0:11:02 attention and social attention on you.
0:11:08 And what it does and that democratization of fame as a genuinely new phenomenon that’s
0:11:10 sort of different from past eras.
0:11:11 And I think you’re right.
0:11:12 Like it is behavior modifying.
0:11:17 And for me, I have the experience of actually, again, fame is always totally relative.
0:11:19 Different people are famous in different places.
0:11:21 But like, you know, people recognize me on the street.
0:11:26 I do have that awareness that, for instance, if I like screamed at a car that cut me off,
0:11:30 you know, or like almost hit me as it was running the corner, like people might know that was
0:11:31 me and associate with me.
0:11:34 So there is that kind of behavioral modification part of it, too.
0:11:38 But there’s also something profoundly warping about it psychologically.
0:11:42 And I think it is true that that point that you just made, though, is a really interesting
0:11:42 one.
0:11:45 There is some kind of pro-social effect, right?
0:11:49 Of like not wanting to be like a complete maniac in public because that might go viral
0:11:50 or something.
0:11:51 It’s an interesting pro-social aspect of it.
0:11:54 But I also think there’s something so warping about it.
0:11:58 And one of the things that, and I quote this in the book, the move from public posting
0:12:03 to group chat is, I think, 100% driven by that, right?
0:12:07 So more and more of all the traffic, and Instagram talks about this all the time, is happening in
0:12:07 private messaging.
0:12:12 Things are happening in private Facebook groups, signal chats, WhatsApp chats, like sort of try
0:12:19 to basically to kind of reclaim a private space that’s not public space is one of the sort
0:12:20 of bigger trends happening.
0:12:26 I think precisely because of how warping and disquieting it is to be in this kind of digital
0:12:31 panopticon and the subject of near constant total surveillance and social attention.
0:12:33 You’re totally correct.
0:12:35 And I want to get back to the group chat thing because I think towards the end of your book,
0:12:37 you become a little bit of a doomer, Chris.
0:12:40 But you start trying to cite solutions to the problem.
0:12:41 And in the group chat one is an interesting one.
0:12:44 But I want to focus on one thing you said, which is, is it pro-social, right?
0:12:48 And one of the things I noticed right after I wrote Chaos Monkeys, I lived, I kid you
0:12:52 not on a small island in the Northwest in what’s called the San Juans, which is these
0:12:52 beautiful islands.
0:12:52 Yeah, I’ve been there.
0:12:53 It’s beautiful.
0:12:56 Yeah, it’s a cool place, very small town.
0:13:00 And so the reality is everyone’s famous in that neighborhood and that everyone knows who
0:13:01 everyone is and their family.
0:13:06 And if you did something totally crazy and like off the bend, you’d still catch hell for it
0:13:06 to be called.
0:13:07 Like you wouldn’t get away with it.
0:13:09 And so a lot of our focus on privacy.
0:13:11 In fact, this is historically, I know this is a bit of a rabbit hole.
0:13:13 I don’t know if you want to go down here, but you look at the history of privacy and
0:13:15 again, Chris, I’m sure you’ve studied these topics.
0:13:20 Louis Brindus basically created in 1890 with this sort of disquisition called the right
0:13:21 to privacy that he more or less invented, by the way.
0:13:23 The word privacy doesn’t appear once in the Constitution.
0:13:27 And the reason why is because at the time it wasn’t used in the sense that we mean it, which
0:13:30 is the right to live as a stranger among strangers, which again, was a right that was more or less
0:13:35 invented to cope with like urban living where you were losing this ability to actually know
0:13:35 everybody.
0:13:40 And anyhow, long wind up to getting to, I think the group chat phenomenon, not everybody
0:13:40 can go in the group chat.
0:13:42 There’s an admin, right?
0:13:44 If someone gets like completely out of control, they get booted.
0:13:45 And then everyone kind of knows everyone.
0:13:49 So like, you don’t really want to piss people off because there’s typically some theme, at
0:13:51 least in my group chats, often professional, right?
0:13:53 Like I’m in a group chat with Eric and we’re a lot of people that have worked together and
0:13:54 invested through those companies.
0:13:57 And you can’t be that much of a dick to be blunt because you’ll take a hit for it, right?
0:13:58 So it’s self-regulating.
0:14:03 And I think to me, if I was to propose a solution to our current bind, it’s not less technology
0:14:06 like a Butlerian jihad against this thing.
0:14:09 I think it’s using technology in some way to recreate.
0:14:12 I totally agree with that.
0:14:14 I mean, I do think the scale ends up being really the problem.
0:14:17 I mean, the question to me is like, where is the revenue in that model?
0:14:19 And this is sort of the interesting question, right?
0:14:20 This is something I’m really obsessed with.
0:14:27 And it’s the germ of something that I explored in the book and I’m writing about now in relation
0:14:28 to AI.
0:14:34 But like, we tend to conflate, particularly in this era, like useful tech and lucrative
0:14:34 tech.
0:14:41 And those are not like, there’s technologies that are incredibly useful that are not particularly
0:14:44 lucrative, like penicillin right now, like antibiotics.
0:14:46 No one’s making enormous fortunes off them.
0:14:52 Even solar power, which is arguably the most useful technology of our age, is a perfectly
0:14:57 profitable enterprise, but no one’s making like Rockefeller fortunes off of solar right
0:14:57 now.
0:15:02 And then there’s technologies that are incredibly lucrative, but not particularly socially useful.
0:15:09 Like the FanDuel DraftKings tech is like really good tech, like it works really well, but it’s
0:15:12 not like particularly useful, particularly compared to penicillin.
0:15:18 And one of the things I think that ends up happening in a digital space that is so dominated only by
0:15:26 commercial options is you don’t get as much useful tech that might not have a great business
0:15:28 revenue or a business model.
0:15:30 And so this question of, well, what’s right?
0:15:34 So what’s the sort of sustaining business model of the group chat is an interesting one.
0:15:39 Now, obviously, WhatsApp, which Meta owns, is incredibly valuable company.
0:15:41 I mean, incredibly valuable division of Meta.
0:15:45 There’s Signal, which is fascinating because it is a nonprofit and I think a really interesting
0:15:51 model in that respect, but to your point, I totally agree about this sort of reclaiming
0:15:56 kind of community or reclaiming like Dunbar numbers or IRL reactions.
0:16:02 Or what I say in the book is that normal relationships are born of bilateral exchanges of social
0:16:03 attention, right?
0:16:04 As opposed to unilateral, right?
0:16:07 That’s the way we’re all conditioned to work.
0:16:11 And the question is, it’s not a particularly lucrative tech to reclaim.
0:16:16 And that to me is the question of, is there some fundamental tension here between what
0:16:21 the sort of revenue model incentives are and what the tech is best for us as people or whatever?
0:16:24 I mean, one take on that, Chris.
0:16:26 I mean, just to give you the view from the crypto trenches, because I work at a crypto
0:16:29 company, group chats are actually huge in the crypto space.
0:16:33 It’s usually on Telegram, which is an app that most normal people don’t use or most Americans
0:16:34 don’t use, certainly.
0:16:39 And there you actually either pay to enter the group chat or some apps have actually literally
0:16:41 tokenized being able to go into the group chat.
0:16:43 So you have to buy so many of the token.
0:16:47 And then the owner of the group chat was the guy who’s leaking the alpha, because this is
0:16:48 all very speculative, right?
0:16:50 The token represents his value.
0:16:51 There’s a company called Frontech that was short-lived.
0:16:56 I was part of it for a while and I had a channel and you could buy the DAGM token and you could
0:16:57 join the group chat as part of it.
0:17:01 But I think the lesson there is that if you over-financialize things, it loses the social
0:17:03 side of it, which crypto does a lot, right?
0:17:06 AI is everything is computer and crypto, everything is money, like totally everything.
0:17:08 But yeah, I agree with you.
0:17:11 I mean, one place I’d maybe quibble with you a little bit, or I guess, I don’t know,
0:17:11 I’m confused myself.
0:17:16 I think the world we’re heading to, the digital version of things is like the mainstream premium
0:17:17 economy version of the world.
0:17:22 And then I think our friend, Mark Andreessen, that you might know, Eric, his is the A and
0:17:26 the sign behind you, famously said that some people are reality privileged, right?
0:17:29 Some people are wealthy enough or live in a certain context in which they don’t need the
0:17:30 VR headset, right?
0:17:32 Because like their life is good enough, they don’t need it.
0:17:33 But everyone else gets the VR headset.
0:17:37 And so how do you strike that balance between the digital versus the real versions of it?
0:17:41 But I think what happens is, and again, I think it’s the subtext to your entire book, Chris,
0:17:45 who we interact with, who we agree with, is completely uncoupled from our actual physical
0:17:47 place in the world.
0:17:51 And I think that tension between the physical and I wouldn’t say spiritual necessarily, but
0:17:53 the intellectual, is at the heart of all.
0:17:56 I think the nation state is cracking up in a way just to get do more for a hot second.
0:17:59 And I think the internet’s definitely behind part of it, because you don’t have the sense
0:18:03 of collective consensus that the media and TV, for example, used to create during the
0:18:08 Cronkite era, used to have some level of synchrony or synergy that would happen with Cronkite saying,
0:18:09 and that’s the way it is.
0:18:14 And somehow now I scroll my feed versus Blue Sky, and it’s like, no, I don’t know what the
0:18:14 way it is, actually.
0:18:16 It’s not quite clear the way it is.
0:18:19 What’s really interesting, too, is to think about it from it being the opposite problem,
0:18:24 because so much of what happens in sort of the 20s and 30s, particularly when you have
0:18:31 these sort of huge mass broadcast mediums that can sort of capture attention at scale,
0:18:35 right, is that you have sort of this opposite problem, right, which is like the problem of
0:18:36 the mass media.
0:18:42 And this is something that Lippmann encounters when he has a job basically propagandizing for
0:18:47 entrance into World War I, which is that, whoa, this is an insanely powerful tool, and
0:18:53 you can blast out messages at scale to all these people and get them all thinking the same
0:18:55 way or moving the needle in some way.
0:19:01 And that was a problem that Lippmann wrestles with and all sorts of different folks wrestle
0:19:01 with.
0:19:06 And now we have the opposite problem, right, which is there is no getting anything like
0:19:07 that.
0:19:12 I mean, I’ve even come to feel one way to think about a public, right, is paying attention
0:19:13 to the same thing together.
0:19:19 And I’ve even come to feel like weirdly old man nostalgic for the Super Bowl or when
0:19:24 everyone’s talking about Love Island because it feels like, oh, here’s a thing that everyone
0:19:25 is paying.
0:19:27 I’m not watching Love Island, but I know that everyone is.
0:19:29 And I find some weird comfort in that.
0:19:34 I mean, I think it’s so funny because I think 20 or 30 years ago, this was so particularly if
0:19:40 you’re Gen X and you thought of yourself a sort of alternative in whatever way that like
0:19:43 that was stultifying mass culture and middle brow.
0:19:47 But I’ve come to miss that because I think it’s the thing we’re sort of missing, which
0:19:51 is everyone football is really the only thing left.
0:19:53 This sort of everyone pays attention to together.
0:19:54 The elections.
0:19:55 Yeah.
0:19:57 And elections, although we pay attention in such different ways.
0:19:59 But I do think there’s something.
0:20:01 Yeah, there’s something lost in that.
0:20:03 And I don’t know how to get it back.
0:20:08 And I’m also fully aware it might just be like I’m 46 and I’m just succumbing to the
0:20:09 nostalgia of middle age.
0:20:14 What was the last sort of like literary event that like every American paid attention to?
0:20:17 And my vote is for like Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections that came out.
0:20:21 I was literally going to say Franzen The Corrections and then like the whole thing.
0:20:22 Yeah, right.
0:20:24 Everyone had it’s a great book, by the way.
0:20:25 I like Franzen as a writer.
0:20:27 Everyone had to read that damn book.
0:20:30 And since then, it’s never been the case that everyone’s read the same book at all.
0:20:30 Yeah.
0:20:33 I mean, with the possible exception of David Foster Wallace and Infinite Jazz.
0:20:36 But it’s one of those books everyone claims to read, but no one’s actually read.
0:20:37 I think people actually did read The Corrections.
0:20:42 And yeah, it’s weird because if you talk to like Gen Xers, and particularly I think people
0:20:47 like, again, Mark, who came from maybe not like poor mainstream America, what they always
0:20:49 say about the internet is like, oh, I finally found my people.
0:20:52 Like I was interested in whatever, some weird little niche obsession that in your little
0:20:54 Midwestern town, there’s nobody doing it.
0:20:57 Although what’s also interesting to me too, and I’m always curious about the tech.
0:21:01 I feel like I don’t have a great sense actually, and maybe you guys have a better sense of this.
0:21:03 I think A, it’s very funny.
0:21:08 We refer to the algorithm as like a definite article, like it’s sort of totemic or almost
0:21:12 like a deity, like the algorithm served me this.
0:21:16 And it’s always just unclear to me like how sophisticated the algorithm actually is.
0:21:20 Sometimes it just seems very dumb to me where I look at one thing and then it serves me
0:21:22 15 of that.
0:21:24 And it’s like, I probably could have coded that.
0:21:25 It’s not that impressive.
0:21:26 It’s not like that sophisticated.
0:21:31 Sometimes it does find things where I’m like, oh, wow, there’s something interesting happening
0:21:31 here.
0:21:35 I write about the book, like taking a gummy and like realizing that it’s just showing me
0:21:37 pictures of sandwiches.
0:21:40 And after like 30 minutes of just like, it’s like, oh, it knows that I’m high.
0:21:41 Like that’s a kind of magic.
0:21:48 One of the things I think is interesting is there will be these kinds of things that go viral
0:21:54 or have this kind of like allergic resonance that everyone is then talking about or everyone
0:22:01 does, particularly in Gen Z, like reference or even the way that people talk like this
0:22:06 sort of brain rot Gen Z way of talking is really interesting to me because that does seem
0:22:08 recognizably mass, right?
0:22:13 In the same way, the 1960s, it was like far out and groovy and all these things that like
0:22:20 there is this really distinct argot of Gen Z, but they’re getting it all not from mass
0:22:23 culture, but from basically algorithmic social media.
0:22:28 That to me is super fascinating because there’s something that’s enduring beneath the kind of
0:22:33 technological or institutional layers of how culture is being mediated and how attention
0:22:35 is being captured and bought and sold.
0:22:36 Yeah, I forget who it was.
0:22:44 I was mad at Ireland recently and visit family and the kids need that same argument as in
0:22:48 the U.S. versus if you had visited Ireland 20 years ago, you wouldn’t be able to understand
0:22:51 them because they spoke some dialect that would be unintelligible to American ears.
0:22:53 And you see that actually in the U.S.
0:22:55 I mean, this is the thing that I’m really obsessed with, too, in the U.S.
0:22:59 Like one of the things that’s really fascinating is the lack of sort of geographical distinction
0:23:00 in geographical cultures.
0:23:03 You’re starting to see this like this shows up in politics, right?
0:23:07 Which is that like it used to be the case that rural Mississippi and rural Minnesota just
0:23:08 voted very, very differently.
0:23:15 And that’s because the people that occupied those places had different ethnic backgrounds
0:23:20 in Minnesota, like Scandinavian socialists, but also different religious traditions, Southern
0:23:21 Baptist versus Lutheran.
0:23:27 And there were all these like defining sort of geographic features of different places that
0:23:28 would show up in politics.
0:23:37 And increasingly, there is this kind of homogenization happening where all sort of rural folks of
0:23:41 certain demographics more and more vote like each other and also listen to the same music
0:23:44 and have the same kind of omniculture.
0:23:51 And that’s also true of sort of big city, college educated, upper middle class folks where like
0:23:58 you could go to the cool neighborhood in Columbus and there’s going to be some restaurant called
0:24:04 like Stern and Stem that serves whatever like farm to table, like gastropub food.
0:24:11 Like it’s interesting that these sort of omnicultures supplant localism in this moment when we don’t
0:24:14 have massness as the sort of central cultural feature.
0:24:17 The place is called Pine and Spruce in Seattle, but it’s exactly what you’re saying.
0:24:20 And it’s exactly right.
0:24:22 It’s all called stem to stern or pig to snout.
0:24:27 It’s always this kind of folksy and you can imagine the artificially distressed wood and the
0:24:33 artificially distressed people and the exposed iron and the bare filament bulbs and the hoppy.
0:24:34 You know, it’s all the same.
0:24:35 It’s all the same.
0:24:38 But I think the person who first called this, by the way, I think Dan Savage, who was like the
0:24:43 sex columnist or whatever, for like the Seattle local reg was after the Bush election to be a
0:24:45 total Gen X or millennial.
0:24:47 He said it’s not blue states and red states.
0:24:50 It’s like a blue urban archipelago in a sea of red and that the culture was actually going
0:24:52 two directions and you see it everywhere.
0:24:56 But to quote our friend Balaji, the analogy he cites, if you remember back when we had
0:25:00 Windows machines, you would do something called defragmenting the disk.
0:25:04 And what that means is Windows is such an inefficient operating system that a single application
0:25:07 serves its memory throughout the hard drive and that it slows it down because you’re
0:25:07 reading from many places.
0:25:09 So you have to do this thing called defragmenting.
0:25:13 You know, it basically write the memory back to the same place that the app would start running
0:25:13 fast again.
0:25:17 And so what he feels is happening, and of course, he believes in this thing called the
0:25:20 network state, is that we’re basically defragmenting reality, right?
0:25:23 And what we need to solve this is take all the people that think like each other and get them
0:25:26 back in the same state and in some sense defrag the disk.
0:25:29 I think the realities of that are a little challenging, but it’s an interesting thought experiment to imagine
0:25:33 that if you were to do that, right, in some magical way, then you would end up with a
0:25:35 holy red and a holy blue country or something.
0:25:41 Yeah, I mean, this question of like how the sort of individuation of the current attention
0:25:47 marketplace and how it relates to what we share and what we don’t share is like there’s just
0:25:49 a bunch of really interesting questions in there.
0:25:52 Some of which, again, like the point you were making before about like I found my people on
0:25:57 the Internet, like for a trans kid, right, who’s in a place where there’s no one else like
0:26:02 them to find on the Internet people that are going through this.
0:26:03 It’s incredible, right?
0:26:09 And that’s true for a million different ways of being that you might be as a teenager or as
0:26:10 a young adult or as an old adult.
0:26:10 Right.
0:26:18 So there is a level of individuation built into the technology and the market technology
0:26:21 of it now, which drives towards ever more individuation.
0:26:23 But that individuation fails in really interesting ways.
0:26:25 Can I ask you a question, Antonio?
0:26:26 Because I’m really curious about this.
0:26:32 So to me, one of the big unsolved questions that I never quite wrestle to the ground, I talk
0:26:36 a little bit about this notion of like subprime attention is like there’s sort of two different
0:26:39 ways of looking at ad tech to oversimplify.
0:26:45 One is that it has all this incredibly personalized data that no advertiser has ever had access
0:26:45 to.
0:26:50 It’s not just talking to a generic man head of household in the 50s.
0:26:52 It’s talking to like you, Chris Hayes.
0:26:56 I know where you live and what you do and how would you make and like what your medications
0:26:57 are, right?
0:27:03 That allows it a level of sophistication and optimization that’s never been possible before.
0:27:08 And then the other side of this is like, for all of that being true, it’s amazing how
0:27:12 sort of bad, schlocky and ineffective most internet advertising is.
0:27:15 And I think there’s some truth to both of them.
0:27:19 And I kind of wrestle with them a bit in the book, but never feel like resolved on the question.
0:27:21 I’m curious how you think about that.
0:27:23 Yeah, no, it’s a good point.
0:27:23 I mean, it’s funny.
0:27:26 This is going to take us way back last time when I was on your show, probably because
0:27:27 it’s probably what I was on for.
0:27:29 The whole Cambridge Analytica scandal.
0:27:29 Exactly.
0:27:29 That’s right.
0:27:30 You don’t need to go out in the rabbit hole.
0:27:31 It’s a whole story.
0:27:33 Everyone’s probably heard as much as they want to hear about it.
0:27:34 There’s no way to do that, right?
0:27:37 And any media buyer will tell you that a lot of ads are still crap.
0:27:37 And it’s true.
0:27:39 It’s still kind of a statistical phenomenon.
0:27:43 Just to put numbers on it, the CTR, the click-through rate, like how often a user engages
0:27:48 on a thing like Instagram, at least 97% of people who looked at it were just completely
0:27:50 indifferent to the thing, right?
0:27:51 And just didn’t engage.
0:27:52 Yeah.
0:27:54 I mean, look, you can really do a technical deep dive there.
0:27:57 I mean, yes, that data is out there, but a lot of it’s super fragmented.
0:27:59 And it often exists in varying silos.
0:28:02 And then there’s grift and bullshit to be blunt in advertising.
0:28:05 People will sell you data that it’s not nearly as accurate as you think it is.
0:28:08 I mean, companies like Facebook that actually do have a first-party relationship with the
0:28:09 user often have better data for that reason.
0:28:12 And if nothing else, they have a stable notion of identity.
0:28:15 It’s the same Chris Hayes or the same Antonio that shows up on the app every time.
0:28:16 So they kind of know.
0:28:18 When if you just show up on a website, it’s based on a cookie.
0:28:21 And that’s so transient these days that it’s basically meaningless.
0:28:23 So there’s just a lot of practical problems.
0:28:25 And again, it’s funny.
0:28:27 I actually did a story for Wired about it because it pissed me off so much.
0:28:30 You know, the whole conspiracy theory that Zuck is listening to you through your phone
0:28:31 or whatever.
0:28:32 Well, so here’s my question.
0:28:33 This strikes me a lot.
0:28:35 So when you’re on TikTok, right?
0:28:37 TikTok is pretty ad heavy these days.
0:28:42 And I’m always struck that like every ad feels like something from like the Home Shopping
0:28:46 Network or like infomercial I would see at like 5.30 a.m.
0:28:49 before cartoons came on on a Saturday morning in my youth.
0:28:54 And I just I keep thinking to myself, I’m like, why isn’t Progressive Auto Assurance or
0:28:57 GM serving me ads here if this ad tech works?
0:29:03 Like, why are the people that spend like the most amount of money on advertising and for whom
0:29:07 this is particularly true for brands like car brands and insurance brands where, you know,
0:29:09 there’s unbelievable continuity, right?
0:29:11 People just keep the same thing.
0:29:16 And that’s why like traditionally, right, the younger demographics in advertising were so
0:29:16 valuable.
0:29:21 You want to sell someone their first Toyota because they’re just going to buy Toyotas after
0:29:21 that.
0:29:23 So you’re really purchasing a lifetime of purchases.
0:29:27 So if that’s the case and young people are in TikTok, it’s like if this is such effective
0:29:31 advertising and Detroit spends like why do they never get an ad there?
0:29:31 I don’t know.
0:29:36 Maybe they’re just dinosaurs and they’re wrong or maybe it’s not as good, but I just don’t
0:29:37 know the answer to it.
0:29:38 It’s totally true.
0:29:39 I mean, there’s TikTok.
0:29:40 There’s an app called Whatnot.
0:29:43 I mean, it’s basically people stomping for a product and then buying from it.
0:29:45 I think it works for D2C brands, right?
0:29:49 It’s very niche brands that people associate with and buy very easily.
0:29:50 I mean, you’re absolutely correct.
0:29:52 That’s the whole point of brand advertising, right?
0:29:55 Again, to use more ad tech ease, high LTV, high lifetime value, right?
0:30:00 If you become a Ford buyer for the continuity of your life, you Mustang and you buy an SUV when
0:30:03 you have a family, that’s literally kind of thousands of dollars a lifetime value.
0:30:04 I’m not sure to be honest.
0:30:05 I don’t know what the answer is.
0:30:07 Yeah, no, I don’t know if it’s like a thing to answer.
0:30:12 Just like, it’s so striking to me that that’s the case and particularly how much that still
0:30:19 dominates these sort of older media that’s still when you watch a big sports game on a
0:30:21 broadcast if you’re watching Sunday football, right?
0:30:27 And there are also that scale that is very hard to replicate with TikTok.
0:30:31 To your point about how scalable the TikTok stuff is, like, if you make some, like, nifty
0:30:36 little gizmo that you can drop ship from China and you have low overhead, you can sell it to
0:30:38 a small number of people on TikTok.
0:30:40 That’s not the way you’re going to sell a Ford F-150.
0:30:43 So there’s a sort of interesting scale question there.
0:30:48 But I also just wonder, like, what the next…
0:30:53 Basically, we’ve seen these sort of movements from text-based to video.
0:30:59 And if there’s something after that, like, basically, what the next big thing is, what
0:31:04 is the next bite dance that does to TikTok what TikTok sort of did to the incumbents and
0:31:05 Facebook and stuff like that?
0:31:07 I mean, my vote would be for AI.
0:31:08 To frame it as a bigger thing, right?
0:31:10 We’re going from sort of a textual culture.
0:31:12 I think you said somewhere in the book that, like, the thought that we’re going to be reading
0:31:17 a 6,000-word thought piece in The New Yorker, I doubt most young people can even do that.
0:31:20 I can barely do it, actually, even though I used to do it regularly.
0:31:22 I’ve forced myself to do it, which is weird.
0:31:26 But it doesn’t mean we’re going back to an oral phase in which we’re going to be citing
0:31:28 Homer in iambic pentameter or something, right?
0:31:32 The oral phase, which Neil Postman writes about a lot, that was very mnemonic, right?
0:31:33 It was very memory intensive.
0:31:38 People had these sort of recognizable tropes and forms, but they also remembered a lot.
0:31:40 They knew they could recite poetry.
0:31:41 They could recite biblical verses.
0:31:44 There was an enormous amount stored in the brain.
0:31:46 Yeah, I mean, I think we were at the tail end of that.
0:31:50 I still had to memorize Shakespeare’s sets in high school, which I don’t even really have
0:31:51 to do anymore.
0:31:54 But I think the oral-textual divide wasn’t even about the format.
0:31:55 It’s the form of thought, right?
0:31:58 And when I talk to the AI, I don’t think they’re human, by the way.
0:32:00 I think everyone who thinks they’re human is crazy.
0:32:03 But I talk to it as if it were a human, because that’s actually the best way to interface with
0:32:03 it.
0:32:07 And you engage in this sort of Socratic dialogue with it, trying to get an answer.
0:32:09 Sometimes the AI bot gets crazy and hallucinates.
0:32:11 I mean, so do humans, and you kind of have to put it back on the right course.
0:32:13 But I think that’s the thing, right?
0:32:17 And talking to the human, and when you manage to map that to e-commerce or travel, when I
0:32:22 can say, I want to go, which I do, go to France for a week in August to see my daughter
0:32:23 and spend a week in Brittany.
0:32:28 So book me an Airbnb, book me a flight, and make it not cost more than $3,000, if that’s
0:32:28 impossible.
0:32:31 And just give me a button that says go and do it.
0:32:33 I mean, I would literally bet large portions of my net worth in time.
0:32:34 That’s the future.
0:32:35 That’s going to be the gateway.
0:32:38 AI is going to upstream everything about the consumer experience.
0:32:40 That I totally agree with.
0:32:44 My bigger question is what it does to, like, dicking around on your phone.
0:32:52 Like, I agree that there are these very obvious, to me, use cases, incredibly useful cases of
0:32:57 if it gets good enough, particularly the sort of agentic idea that you’re describing there.
0:32:58 There’s lots of stuff.
0:33:03 And the idea of it essentially becoming, in the way the browser was, like, the sort of
0:33:05 interface being the thing that you’re talking to, right?
0:33:08 But that’s to do all the useful stuff, right?
0:33:11 Like, my question is, like, what does it do?
0:33:15 Like, when you get that screen time notification on your phone, right, what you’re doing is you’re
0:33:19 looking, a lot of it is not booking flights and doing stuff.
0:33:20 Some of it is.
0:33:26 But what it does to that part of it is sort of the big, I don’t have the answer.
0:33:27 I don’t think anyone has the answer.
0:33:30 I think if you had the answer, you could probably make a fortune with the right bet.
0:33:33 But I just don’t know what it’s going to do there.
0:33:39 The place we started, which is my wonder if it produces a kind of brute force level of
0:33:42 pollution that then actually becomes hard to manage for the platforms.
0:33:53 Two, it gets so good that it creates this kind of surreal new genre of, like, pure attentional
0:34:00 drug, like the slot machine that, like, people just watch and doesn’t have any, like, real
0:34:06 meaning because it’s just this complete, like, neural network produced hive mind creation.
0:34:10 Or people just opt for humans and it doesn’t really change it that much anyway.
0:34:12 Those seem like the three big options.
0:34:16 There’s a paper from Yahoo Research in 2001 or 2002 or something in which they use the
0:34:18 multi-iron bandit problem, which precedes advertising, obviously.
0:34:20 But then they adapt it.
0:34:23 Because if you look at a page, there’s several bandits there, right?
0:34:24 Which are different ads.
0:34:28 And if you click on one, there’s a chance of it leading to a conversion or not.
0:34:30 And a lot of the math behind this one I forgot is that.
0:34:31 Oh, that’s cool.
0:34:34 As a side footnote, I think look at the Apple Vision as an example, right?
0:34:35 It’s, like, way too bulky.
0:34:36 It’s way too expensive.
0:34:37 It’s not quite good enough yet.
0:34:41 No, and I think the thing about the Apple Vision and VR to me is, and I write some, like,
0:34:45 in Siren’s Call about this, like, at a certain point, if you’re thinking about this commodity
0:34:47 and you come up against these hard limits, right?
0:34:50 So at a certain point, it’s like, okay, we have people looking at their phones as much
0:34:50 as they possibly can.
0:34:53 If we keep them awake a little longer, we can get more out of it.
0:34:54 We start going to children.
0:34:57 We can go, we sold the phone to everyone in the world.
0:35:01 Like, how do you keep expanding the frontier of the commodity to mine?
0:35:03 And that’s why VR is so important from that.
0:35:10 Because if you have it literally every second, you’ve just unlocked this enormous new landscape.
0:35:16 You’ve discovered these, like, new deep sea reserves, right, that no one had before.
0:35:19 The now, every, literally every second, right?
0:35:24 If it’s on every waking second, you can now mine that attention and extract and commodify it
0:35:25 in a way that wasn’t before.
0:35:30 And because Apple did this once before with the smartphone as the crucial piece of hardware
0:35:34 to massively expand that supply, like, that’s, I think, the kind of commercial
0:35:37 logic of the device, right?
0:35:39 Whatever it does after that.
0:35:41 But it’s only going to be waking hours, Chris, 16 hours.
0:35:44 We’re going to need full Neuralink to actually run ads inside your dreams, actually.
0:35:46 No, literally, but…
0:35:47 We’re going to need the full 24.
0:35:48 That’s the point.
0:35:52 It’s the frontiers, like, there’s a certain rapaciousness here.
0:35:53 No, well, of course there is.
0:35:55 I can see that the ad tech industry is completely rapacious.
0:35:59 So at the end of Chaos Monkey, I think in the, like, afterward that I wrote in the second
0:36:03 edition or whatever it was, I mentioned that Facebook is running out of people, right?
0:36:04 Exactly, right, yeah.
0:36:09 Like, I made the joke that they’d start breeding new humans just to become Facebook users to
0:36:10 sell them ads or something, which obviously is ridiculous.
0:36:13 But I think it’s a similar concept that there’s actually only so many attention hours in the
0:36:14 day, right?
0:36:18 Yeah, and you do come up, you know, I’m definitely not like a degrowth leftist at all.
0:36:21 I would call myself like a pro-growth left liberal.
0:36:23 Abundance, I think is what we call them these days.
0:36:24 Abundance, Chris, abundance.
0:36:26 Yes, distinct from that in some ways.
0:36:34 But I guess my point would be, there are these fundamental tensions between the need for
0:36:38 endless growth and what boundaries you hit up against and what it does to people.
0:36:45 And you could create a company that was just provided a useful service and printed money
0:36:45 for a long time.
0:36:48 And in some ways, Google had that for a long time.
0:36:51 Like, they had a genuinely useful service.
0:36:53 It genuinely transformed how we got information.
0:36:55 It was insanely profitable.
0:36:57 It was a money printing machine.
0:37:00 And it wasn’t enough, right?
0:37:02 Like, you have to grow it past that.
0:37:09 And in some ways, with the use of AI, like, the entire open web that was the basis for the
0:37:11 first iteration of Google is collapsing underneath it.
0:37:16 And what comes after when you talk about this sort of interface we have with the AI chatbot,
0:37:23 I find that for my work, the only way that I can use AI is with web search on and telling
0:37:28 it to cite everything because I can’t risk a hallucination.
0:37:33 And so what I need to do is I need to check everything against, like, did a person report
0:37:33 this?
0:37:35 Did a human being go and call this person?
0:37:36 Is that name right?
0:37:44 And I do wonder, like, the surreality that we’re all entering into once the kind of growth
0:37:48 revenue model collapses the open web, like, what is left?
0:37:53 The stuff that’s actually being used to create all that useful information, who’s going to
0:37:55 maintain that if the whole thing collapses?
0:37:59 Yeah, I think I cite Edward Abbey and Chaos Monkey’s ampergraph in there somewhere that
0:38:01 growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
0:38:02 Right, exactly.
0:38:03 Yes, exactly.
0:38:04 Kind of true.
0:38:05 I mean, yeah, it’s funny.
0:38:09 I cite The Abundance Agenda, which, you know, is Ezra’s book that basically is telling the
0:38:12 left, OK, don’t be dumb about capitalism and growth.
0:38:13 Like, it could actually be a good thing, right?
0:38:18 And I think there’s another book by Alex Karp of Palantir called The Technological Republic
0:38:21 that’s basically telling the right, look, I mean, the market isn’t actually the solution
0:38:24 to everything and doesn’t actually necessarily tell us what is good.
0:38:27 Like, what are the ultimate good ends of social life?
0:38:29 The market isn’t necessarily there to answer that question.
0:38:33 I mean, I think Peter Thiel famously asked the question, we’re promised flying cars and we
0:38:34 got 140 characters.
0:38:36 I’ll say this on that last point.
0:38:44 It’s interesting to me to compare the amount of capex and media attention to AI versus the
0:38:50 kind of insane solar power revolution happening right now, because it’s a little like the flying
0:38:51 car 140 character thing.
0:38:58 we’ve been burning carbon for energy before the Industrial Revolution, right?
0:39:03 Like we’ve been burning trees for wood stoves and then we got the Industrial Revolution and
0:39:05 we’ve been burning fossil fuels specifically.
0:39:11 But a world where we get to, which is totally possible now, I think from an engineering standpoint
0:39:18 of like the marginal cost of energy basically dropping to essentially zero, where we just get the solar
0:39:25 solar tech good enough that we kind of reclaim the abundance, to use a word, of the sun.
0:39:26 They write about that in the book a bit.
0:39:31 Like that is such a wildly revolutionary thing to happen.
0:39:35 And partly because it’s not that lucrative, I think in the end.
0:39:39 But also it’s not that intentionally salient in the way that AI is.
0:39:44 And so you do have this weird thing happening, which is like all the capex, all the attention
0:39:47 is like the future technology, the epic defining technology is going to be AI.
0:39:49 And I don’t know if I agree with that or not.
0:39:50 I understand why people, some people think that’s true.
0:39:52 I understand some of the skepticism.
0:39:58 But it’s interesting to contrast that with the fact that like right now we’re in the midst
0:40:01 of an apocal transformation in how we get energy.
0:40:04 And it’s just not that sexy.
0:40:06 You didn’t mention nuclear, Chris.
0:40:07 Nuclear might have to be part of the portfolio.
0:40:13 But I agree with you that having basically at the margins the intelligence and at the margin
0:40:14 free energy is going to be nuts.
0:40:15 Yeah, that’s right.
0:40:22 Yes, those two things combined like might be like within pretty close.
0:40:23 And obviously they’re related, right?
0:40:25 Because the energy consumption on the compute is enormous.
0:40:26 Yeah.
0:40:27 And you’re going to need the build out.
0:40:30 But if you got to that point, Jesus, what does that even look like?
0:40:30 I don’t know.
0:40:32 Chris, I know you got to run.
0:40:34 So thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
0:40:38 The book is The Siren’s Call, How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.
0:40:39 Thanks so much for coming on the show.
0:40:40 I really enjoyed that.
0:40:41 Thanks so much.
0:40:46 Thanks for listening to the A16Z podcast.
0:40:51 If you enjoyed the episode, let us know by leaving a review at ratethispodcast.com slash A16Z.
0:40:54 We’ve got more great conversations coming your way.
0:40:55 See you next time.