AI Content and the War for Your Attention

1. 0:00 – 0:40

   The Age of Attention and AI Slop

   1. CHChris Hayes0:00

      Does AI so ruthlessly optimize for what you will pay attention to, it totally alienates you from what you wanna pay attention to?

   2. AMAntonio García Martínez0:07

      Everyone kind of carries themselves like they are a Kardashian everywhere they go. In the future, we're not all gonna be famous for fifteen minutes, we're all gonna be famous to fifteen people.

   3. CHChris Hayes0:16

      If, if it's on every waking second, you can now mine that attention and extract and, and commodify it in a way that wasn't before.

   4. AMAntonio García Martínez0:23

      But it's only gonna be waking hours, Chris, sixteen hours. We're gonna need full Neuralink to actually put run ads inside your dreams, actually, just to be clear.

   5. CHChris Hayes0:28

      No [laughs] literally, but that's, that's-

   6. AMAntonio García Martínez0:29

      We're gonna need, we're gonna need the full twenty-four. [upbeat music]

2. 0:40 – 2:02

   Guest Introductions & Backgrounds

   1. ETErik Torenberg0:40

      We're so excited to, uh, to ha-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, why don't you briefly introduce yourself?

   2. AMAntonio García Martínez0:50

      Yeah. I started in ad tech, I guess, in two thousand and eight in, in attention capitalism, as Chris 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, I suspect Chris is probably in the same bucket, Facebook Ads used to be these little postage stamps on the right-hand side.

   3. ETErik Torenberg1:09

      Yep.

   4. AMAntonio García Martínez1:09

      And then it became this huge money machine. Um, wrote a book about that time called Chaos Monkeys that came out in two thousand and sixteen.

   5. ETErik Torenberg1:15

      Yep. I've read, I've read it.

   6. AMAntonio García Martínez1:16

      I've done well. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I quoted 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 [chuckles] I went back to tech. I'm the, I'm the head of ads at a16z.

   7. ETErik Torenberg1:28

      An-Antonio famously says that the prize for beating, uh, Matt Yglesias in the Substack rankings is, is you then become Matt Yglesias, and, and that wasn't, uh, inspiring enough. [laughing]

   8. AMAntonio García Martínez1:38

      I'm not-

   9. ETErik Torenberg1:38

      It's pretty funny.

   10. AMAntonio García Martínez1:39

       I'm not anti-Matt, but we were briefly among the top ten or fifteen Substackers on a revenue basis, circa, like, twenty twenty-one, and he was definitely a, a comp, I guess. Him and Andrew Sullivan were the, definitely the winners of that race.

   11. CHChris Hayes1:52

       I, I'm, I feel like I would 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.

3. 2:02 – 3:03

   The Pollution of Attention and Spam

   1. CHChris Hayes2:02

      I think there's just a huge pollution problem, and I think that, you know, the, the, 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 gonna 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 [chuckles] 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

4. 3:03 – 5:14

   AI Content: Spam or Creativity?

   1. CHChris Hayes3:03

      and, [chuckles] and it just dislocates all human creators? Do people not like it, so the algorithmic 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?

   2. AMAntonio García Martínez3:15

      Is AI slop gonna win? Um-

   3. CHChris Hayes3:17

      Yeah. Is AI... That's, that's one way of saying it. Like, will... Is AI slop gonna win?

   4. AMAntonio García Martínez3:21

      I mean, yes and no. I mean, you're seeing it in the form you have Twitter already, right? And maybe I would think this 'cause I, I was kind of a creator, paid for my creations, I guess, to some degree, but I think a lot of it is kinda empty and sterile. And I think, I think humans who are able to be creative and use AI tools correctly will have superpowers.

   5. CHChris Hayes3:37

      Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm pretty obsessed right now with AI slop and particularly, like, these sort of subgenres that feel like... You know, th- 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, n-not all of it, right? But a lo- 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, [chuckles] right? And so there's this whole, like, universe of, like, AI babies singing "Bless the Lord, Oh My Soul" and, you know... And, uh, 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, [laughs] which is, like, just, like, signature AI slop. And I... The, to me, the sort of question about all this stuff is, you know, one of the theses of the book is that there's c- there's this kind of disconnect between what we will pay attention to and, in some volitional sense, what we wanna pay attention to. And the question is, does AI, does the m- does, 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 wanna pay attention to? And if it does do that, do, do people stick with it, or do they s- do they reach some point where they feel too alienated from what they wanna be spending their time doing?

   6. AMAntonio García Martínez5:06

      Well, I, well, I think the challenge there is what you put, Chris, which by the way, I, I think, I think it's time that we just plug Chris' book. I think you wrote a, a phenomenal book, actually.

   7. CHChris Hayes5:13

      Well, thanks.

   8. AMAntonio García Martínez5:13

      And

5. 5:14 – 7:01

   The Human Response to AI-Generated Content

   1. AMAntonio García Martínez5:14

      I would recommend it to most of my attic. Um, people... And, and one of the things you cite is the, to use the, the marketing speak, acquisition and retention are different things, right? [chuckles] 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 h-how do you maintain it? And even with the guy with a gun in his hand, it might be a little hard [chuckles] 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 gonna sit there and stare at the slop all day. That said, I've used TikTok and, like, like, a meth head, like, getting into a Fenty fold on the street. Like, I emerge two hours later, I come to-

   2. CHChris Hayes5:51

      Yeah

   3. AMAntonio García Martínez5:51

      ... and like, "What, what the hell just happened?" And then I delete the app from my phone 'cause I never wanna do that again.

   4. CHChris Hayes5:55

      Yeah.

   5. AMAntonio García Martínez5:55

      Um, so that's maybe the [laughs] the counter argument.

   6. CHChris Hayes5:58

      No, that's, that's... Well, first of all, thanks for the kind words. I appreciate it, uh, especially because I'm not a-I'm not a practitioner in ad tech, and, you know, so much of this story is sort of a, an ad tech story. I mean, it's, it's, I think deeper than ad tech. Ad tech is sort of epiphenomenal [laughs] to the story, but-

   7. ETErik Torenberg6:12

      Yeah. Yeah.

   8. CHChris Hayes6:13

      But, but, so it's, it's really gratifying to hear that from someone who's, who's w- who's worked in it. And yeah, like, I've had the ex-exact same experience. That's sort of, again, that, you know, the, the sort of the defining metaphor of the book, the Sirens 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 gonna just rebel. Well, ba-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

6. 7:01 – 9:45

   Social Media, Fame, and Self-Perception

   1. CHChris Hayes7:01

      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 [laughs] that were tough calls, where they're trying to, you know, create a user experience that is not gonna repel people and is gonna 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.

   2. ETErik Torenberg7:34

      We've had a slop problem before AI, right? I, I mentioned LinkedIn earlier in terms of how, how fake that, [laughs] that, that network feels, but also on Instagram, right? Like, people have Finstas, you know, fake Instagrams for, for-

   3. CHChris Hayes7:43

      Yeah

   4. ETErik Torenberg7:43

      ... for a reason. So this idea of, like, who you present yourself as and who, who you actually are or 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, w-w-why are you so, um, convinced that, that it will?

   5. CHChris Hayes8:10

      Well-

   6. ETErik Torenberg8:10

      That it will expand that gap between what we want to be engaging with and what we actually engage with?

   7. CHChris Hayes8:14

      I just think to me it's sort of a quantity and automation question, right? Like, one of the things about online success is that it's not a batting average. It's, like, your total number of hits. [laughs] 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, MrBeast talks about this, other people talk about it, too. Like, it... 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, it doesn't. If, if you're thinking about it as this quantity game, right? Th- and this is where the sort of brute force spam analogy comes in. Like, if you're automating a thousand [laughs] 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? [laughs] 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 gonna do to the existing models for, you know, for, for the, for these platforms.

   8. AMAntonio García Martínez9:30

      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.

   9. CHChris Hayes9:37

      It's a great book, isn't it?

   10. AMAntonio García Martínez9:39

       And I'm gonna be that guy. So I think I have a line in Chaos Monkeys that says, you know, Andy Warhol was wrong. In the

7. 9:45 – 14:43

   The Group Chat Solution & Community

   1. AMAntonio García Martínez9:45

      future, we're not all gonna be famous for 15 minutes. We're all gonna be famous to 15 people, right?

   2. CHChris Hayes9:48

      15 people, yeah.

   3. AMAntonio García Martínez9:49

      And the fact-

   4. CHChris Hayes9:49

      It's a great line.

   5. AMAntonio García Martínez9:50

      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.

   6. CHChris Hayes10:08

      Yeah.

   7. AMAntonio García Martínez10:08

      And, and people... And as a side thing, like, I, yesterday, you know, I'm, 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 that. And I just, I... 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? [laughs] That's it. It was gone. I mean, maybe it remains as, like, local lore, but it never got bigger than that. You didn't, weren't really worried about anything, right?

   8. CHChris Hayes10:42

      Yeah.

   9. AMAntonio García Martínez10:43

      And somehow that's totally changed the way that people think about themselves in that, in the world.

   10. CHChris Hayes10:48

       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 social attention and, 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-

   11. AMAntonio García Martínez11:02

       Yeah

   12. CHChris Hayes11:02

       ... 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 f-famous in different r-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, [laughs] you know, or, like, almost hit me as it was rounding the corner, like, people might know that that was me and associate it 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 you just made, though, is a really interesting one of, like, there is some kind of pro-social effect, right? [laughs] Of, like, not wanting to be, like, a complete maniac in public because that, you know, that might go viral or something. That's, it's, it's 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-Y-y-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 rec-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 [chuckles] and social attention.

   13. AMAntonio García Martínez12:44

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

   14. CHChris Hayes13:07

       Yeah, I've been there. It's beautiful.

   15. AMAntonio García Martínez13:09

       Yeah, it's cool place, very small town. And so, like the reality is y- everyone's kind of famous in that neighborhood, and that 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 hell for it, to be clear. 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 wanna go down anywhere. But if you look at the history of privacy, and again, Chris, I'm sure you know 'cause you, you study these topics. You know, Louis Brandeis basically created in eighteen ninety 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 'cause 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-

   16. CHChris Hayes13:51

       Right

   17. AMAntonio García Martínez13:51

       ...where you were losing this ability to actually know everybody. And anyhow, long wind-up to getting to, I think the group chat phenomenon, right? 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 kinda knows everyone, so, like, you don't really wanna piss people off 'cause, like, there's typically some theme, at least in my group chats, often professional, right? Like, I'm in a group chat with Erik, and we're a lot of people that have worked together, invested through those companies. Um, you can't, you can't be that much of a dick, to be blunt, because, like, y-you'll take a hit for it, right? So it's kinda 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 Butlerian jihad against, you know, this thing. I think it's using technology in some way to recreate the privacy.

   18. CHChris Hayes14:31

       Yeah. 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, this is sort of the interesting question, right? Like,

8. 14:43 – 19:22

   Revenue Models and Useful vs. Lucrative Tech

   1. CHChris Hayes14:43

      this is something I'm really obsessed with [chuckles] 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. But like , we tend to conflate, [chuckles] particularly in this era, like, useful tech and lucrative tech, and those are not... Like there's, there's 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 o-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, tech is like really good tech. Like [chuckles] 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, an incredibly valuable company. I mean, incredibly valuable division of Meta. There's Signal, which is fascinating 'cause 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 r-reclaiming kind of community or reclaiming like Dunbar num-numbers 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, [laughs] that's the way we're all conditioned to work. And the question is, can you do that at, you know... I-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.

   2. AMAntonio García Martínez17:05

      I, I mean, o-one take on that, Chris, I mean, just to give you the view from the crypto trenches, 'cause I work at a crypto company. Um, there, there actually are, group chats are actually huge in the crypto space. It's usually on Telegram, which is an app that most normal people don't use [chuckles] 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 join the group chat.

   3. CHChris Hayes17:26

      Oh, that's interesting.

   4. AMAntonio García Martínez17:26

      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, 'cause this is all very speculative, right? The token represents his value. There's a company called Friend Tech that was short-lived. I was part of it for a while, and I had a channel, and you could buy the DAGM token, and you could join the group chat as part of it. 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.

   5. CHChris Hayes17:49

      Right. [laughs]

   6. AMAntonio García Martínez17:49

      Which crypto does a lot, right? It makes everything ev-- You know, AI is everything is computer, and crypto, like everything is money. Like literally everything.

   7. CHChris Hayes17:56

      Right.

   8. AMAntonio García Martínez17:56

      Um, but like y-yeah, I agree with you. I mean, one, one place I'd maybe quibble with you a little bit, or, 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 Andreessen, that you might know, Eric, um, his is the A on the sign behind you, 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? 'Cause, 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 to 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, 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 'cause you don't have the sense of collective consensus that the media and TV, for example, used to create during the Cronkite era. You used to have some, some level of like-

   9. CHChris Hayes19:01

      Yeah

   10. AMAntonio García Martínez19:02

       ... 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 [chuckles] versus Blue Sky, and it's like, "No, I, I don't know what the way it is actually." [chuckles] It's not like-

   11. CHChris Hayes19:12

       Yeah

   12. AMAntonio García Martínez19:12

       ... the way it is.

   13. CHChris Hayes19:13

       What's, what's really interesting too is to think about it from the, from the op- from it being the opposite problem because so much of what happens in sort of the '20s and '30s, particularly

9. 19:22 – 22:25

   The Fragmentation and Homogenization of Culture

   1. CHChris Hayes19:22

      when you have this, 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. [chuckles] And, 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. It... and you can blast out messages [chuckles] 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 [chuckles] 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, a public, right, 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'm, 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 stultifying, you know, mass culture and middlebrow. But I've, I've come to kind of miss that [chuckles] 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-

   2. AMAntonio García Martínez21:13

      The elections.

   3. CHChris Hayes21:13

      Yeah, and elections, although we pay attention in such different ways.

   4. AMAntonio García Martínez21:16

      Yeah. [chuckles]

   5. CHChris Hayes21:16

      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 it back right. 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.

   6. AMAntonio García Martínez21:31

      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 like-

   7. CHChris Hayes21:39

      I was literally gonna say Franzen, The Corrections-

   8. AMAntonio García Martínez21:41

      Yeah

   9. CHChris Hayes21:41

      ... and then like the whole Oprah Winfrey thing.

   10. AMAntonio García Martínez21:44

       The Franzen, The Corrections.

   11. CHChris Hayes21:44

       Yeah.

   12. AMAntonio García Martínez21:44

       Right. Every-everyone had-- And it's a great book, by the way. I like Franzen 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.

   13. CHChris Hayes21:52

       Yeah.

   14. AMAntonio García Martínez21:53

       I mean, with the possible exception of David Foster Wallace and Infinite Jest, but it, but it's one of those books that everyone claims to read but no one's actually read. I think people actually did read The, The Corrections. And yeah, it's weird because i-if you talk to, if you talk to like Gen, 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."

   15. CHChris Hayes22:13

       Yeah.

   16. AMAntonio García Martínez22:13

       Like, "I was interested in whatever," some weird little niche obsession-

   17. CHChris Hayes22:16

       Yes, that's... Yeah

   18. AMAntonio García Martínez22:17

       ... that in your little Midwestern town there's nobody doing it.

   19. CHChris Hayes22:19

       Although what's also interesting to me too, and I, I'm always curious about the tech, I feel like I don't have a great sense

10. 22:25 – 24:35

    The Future of Media, Advertising, and AI

    1. CHChris Hayes22:25

       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 def-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, and it's like, that doesn't, I, I, I probably could have coded that. [chuckles] 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, 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 [chuckles] 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 [chuckles] 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.

    2. AMAntonio García Martínez24:11

       Yeah, I forget who it was that was me- they, they visited Ireland recently and, um, visited family, and the kids use the exact same, uh, argot as in the US, versus if you had visited Ireland 20 years ago, it would've been a comp- you wouldn't be able to understand them because they spoke-

    3. CHChris Hayes24:27

       No

    4. AMAntonio García Martínez24:27

       ... some dialect that would be unintelligible to American ears.

    5. CHChris Hayes24:29

       And you see that actually in the US. I mean, this is a thing that I'm really obsessed with, too, in the US. Like, one of the things that's really fascinating is

11. 24:35 – 29:54

    Hyper-Fragmentation, Homogenization, and the Death of Local Culture

    1. CHChris Hayes24:35

       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 Mis- 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, just 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 [chuckles] kind of omniculture. And that's also true of sort of big city, you know, college-educated and gr- um, upper middle class folks where, like, you could go to, like, the cool neighborhood in Columbus, and there's gonna be some restaurant called, like, Stern and Stem that, you know, serves, uh, you know, whatever, like, farm-to-table, like, gastropub food. [laughs] And, like, this is sort of like it's interesting that these sort of omnicultures, you know, su- supplant localism i- in this, in this moment when we don't have massness as the sort of central cultural feature.

    2. AMAntonio García Martínez26:05

       The place is called, uh, Pine and Spruce in Seattle, but it's exactly what you're saying. [both laughing] And you... It's exactly right. It's called, it's all called Stem to Stern or Pig to Snout-

    3. CHChris Hayes26:14

       Right, right, right

    4. AMAntonio García Martínez26:14

       ... or say, there, it's always this kind of folksy, and you can always imagine the distressed wood-

    5. CHChris Hayes26:19

       Yeah

    6. AMAntonio García Martínez26:19

       ... the artificially distressed wood and the artificially distressed people and the exposed cast iron and the, and the bare filament bulbs-

    7. CHChris Hayes26:25

       Yeah

    8. AMAntonio García Martínez26:25

       ... and the hoppy... You know, it's all the same. [laughs] 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-

    9. CHChris Hayes26:34

       Yeah, yeah

    10. AMAntonio García Martínez26:34

        ... whatever the Seattle local rag was. In the, after the Bush election, to be a total Gen X-er millennial, he said it's not blue states and, and red states, it's, like, a blue urban archipelago and a sea of red-

    11. CHChris Hayes26:44

        Yeah

    12. AMAntonio García Martínez26:44

        ... and that the culture was actually going two directions, and you see it everywhere. But this is, I mean, again, to quote our friend, uh, Balaji, the analogy he cites, um, if you remember went 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 stored its memory throughout the hard drive-

    13. CHChris Hayes27:02

        Yep

    14. AMAntonio García Martínez27:02

        ... and then it slows it down because you're reading from many places. So you have to do this thing called defragmenting, and it would basically write the memory back to the same place so that the app would start running fast again. And so what, 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-

    15. CHChris Hayes27:22

        Hmm

    16. AMAntonio García Martínez27:22

        ... defrag the disk. But I, 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 wholly red and a wholly blue country or something.

    17. CHChris Hayes27:33

        Yeah, I mean, this, this question of, like, what sort of how the, 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 mo- 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, or as a young adult or as an old adult, right? But there is a level of individuation built into the technology and the market technology of it now, um, which is how it's all, you know, w- drives towards ever more individuation, but that individuation fails in really interesting ways. Can I, can I ask you a question, Antonio? 'Cause I'm, I'm really curious about this. So to me, one of the big unsolved questions that I never quite wrestle to the ground, I talk a little bit about this notion of, like, subprime attention and l- is, like, there's sort of two different ways of looking at ad tech, um, to oversimplify. One is that it, it's, it's has all this incredibly personalized data that is no advertiser has ever had access to. It, 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 [chuckles] and what you do and how much you make and, like, 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. [laughs] 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.

    18. AMAntonio García Martínez29:50

        Yeah, no, I mean, it's, it's a good point. I mean, it's, it's funny. This is gonna take us way back, back when I, last

12. 29:54 – 33:00

    Algorithms, Dialects, and the New Global Mono-Culture

    1. AMAntonio García Martínez29:54

       time when I was on your show probably, 'cause that's probably what I was on for, the whole Cambridge Analytica scandal.

    2. CHChris Hayes29:58

       Exactly. That's right.

    3. AMAntonio García Martínez29:58

       Which we 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 wanna 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, like, 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 ninety-seven percent of people who looked at it were just completely indifferent to the thing.

    4. CHChris Hayes30:21

       Right.

    5. AMAntonio García Martínez30:21

       And just didn't engage. Yeah, I mean, look, you can really do a, a technical deep dive there. I mean, yes, that data's out there, but a lot of it's super fragmentedAnd it doesn't, it often exists in varying silos, and then there's grift and bullshit, to be blunt, in advertising-

    6. CHChris Hayes30:34

       Yeah

    7. AMAntonio García Martínez30:34

       ... people 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 kinda know. When if you just show up on a website, it's based on a cookie, and that's so transient these days that it's-

    8. CHChris Hayes30:52

       Right

    9. AMAntonio García Martínez30:52

       ... basically meaningless. Um, so there's just a lot of practical problems. Like, and again, I [laughs] it's funny, I actually did a story for Wired about it 'cause it, 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-

    10. CHChris Hayes31:05

        Yeah, here's-

    11. AMAntonio García Martínez31:05

        ... a total detour. What, go ahead, yeah.

    12. CHChris Hayes31:06

        Well, so here's, here's my question. This, 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, infomercial I would see at six, like 5:30 AM before com- cartoons came on on a Saturday morning in my youth. Which, 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, [laughs] why are 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 wanna sell someone-

    13. AMAntonio García Martínez31:59

        Right

    14. CHChris Hayes32:00

        ... their first Toyota because they're just gonna buy Toyotas after that, so you're really kind of purchasing a lifetime purchase. So if that's the case and young people are on TikTok, it's like if this is such effective advertising, and, and Detroit spends... Like, why are they not, why, 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 don- I just don't know the answer to it.

    15. AMAntonio García Martínez32:24

        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, it's basically peop- 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? To, again, to use more ad tech-ese, high LTV, high lifetime value, right? If you're, if you become a Ford buyer for the continuity of your life, and you Mustang and you buy an SUV when you have a family, that's literally kind of thousands of dollars of lifetime value. You know, I'm not, I'm not sure, to be honest. I don't know what the answer is.

    16. CHChris Hayes32:54

        Yeah, no, no, I, I, I don't know if it's, I, I don't know if it's, like, an, an, a thing to answer. Just, like, it's so striking to

13. 33:00 – 36:00

    From Slop to Substance or Saturation?

    1. CHChris Hayes33:00

       me that that's the case, and particularly how much that still dominates these sort of older media, um, that, you know, that's still when you watch a big sports game on a, you know, broadcast if you're watching Sunday football, right? And there 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 [laughs] 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 gonna 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. [laughs] It, y- y- you know, what, what is, what is the next ByteDance that, that does to TikTok what TikTok sort of did to the incumbents and Facebook and stuff like that?

    2. AMAntonio García Martínez34:08

       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 cite somewhere in the book that, like, the thought that we're gonna be reading, you know, a 6,000-word thought piece in The New Yorker. Like, I, I, I doubt most young people can even do that anymore. I, I can barely do it, actually, [laughs] even though I used to do it regularly. I have to, like, force 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 gonna be citing Homer in i- iamb, iambic pentameter or something, right? [laughs] We're not going back to that world.

    3. CHChris Hayes34:33

       Because that was very, that was very... People, the, the, the oral phase which, which Neil Postman writes about a, a lot, you know, that was-

    4. AMAntonio García Martínez34:39

       Right

    5. CHChris Hayes34:39

       ... very mnemonic, right? It was very memory intensive. People had these sort of, um, these r- 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.

    6. AMAntonio García Martínez34:54

       Yeah, and I, and I mean, I think we were at the tail end of that. I still had to memorize Shakespeare sonnets in high school, which I doubt anybody really has to do 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 are, is crazy. But I, I talk to it as if it were a human, 'cause that's actually the best way to interface with it, and you engage in this sort of psych- s- s- 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 kinda have to put it back on the right course. But I think that's the thing, right?

    7. CHChris Hayes35:26

       Hmm.

    8. AMAntonio García Martínez35:26

       And it's, and talking to the human... And, and when you manage to map that to, like, e-commerce or travel, when I can say, "I wanna go," which I do, "go to, to France for a week in August to see my daughter, and spend a week in Brittany, so book me an Airbnb, book me a flight, and make it not cost more than $3,000 if that's even possible."

    9. CHChris Hayes35:43

       Right.

    10. AMAntonio García Martínez35:43

        "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 por- portions of my net worth and time that that's the future. But that's gonna be the gateway. That's, that's how they're... A- AI's gonna upstream everything about the consumer experience in, in the-

    11. CHChris Hayes35:56

        That I totally agree with. My, my bigger question is what it does to, like,

14. 36:00 – 38:18

    AI, Interfaces, and Human-AI Dialogue

    1. CHChris Hayes36:01

       dicking around on your phone. Like, [laughs] like, there, I, I-

    2. AMAntonio García Martínez36:04

       [laughs]

    3. CHChris Hayes36:04

       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, the, particularly the sort of a- agentic idea that you're describing there.

    4. AMAntonio García Martínez36:17

       Right.

    5. CHChris Hayes36:17

       Like, there's, there's lots of stuff, and, and the idea of it, 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? [laughs] Like, my question's like-

    6. AMAntonio García Martínez36:31

       Okay

    7. CHChris Hayes36:31

       ... what does it do, like, when you get that screen time notification on your phone, right, like, what you're doing is you're lookingA 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 don't, I do-- 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 gonna do there. The, 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 'cause it's just the, it, it's just this complete, like, neural network [chuckles] produced hive mind creation. Um, or people just opt for humans, and it doesn't really change it that much anyway. Those seem like the three big options.

    8. AMAntonio García Martínez37:40

       There's a paper from Yahoo Research in, like, two thousand and one or two or something in which they use the multi-armed bandit problem, which precedes advertising, obviously.

    9. CHChris Hayes37:48

       Right.

    10. AMAntonio García Martínez37:48

        But then they adapt it 'cause i-if you look at a page, there's several bandits there, right? Which different, different ads.

    11. CHChris Hayes37:53

        Totally.

    12. AMAntonio García Martínez37:53

        And if you click on one, there's a chance of it leading to a conversion or not.

    13. CHChris Hayes37:58

        Right.

    14. AMAntonio García Martínez37:58

        And a lot of the math behind this one I forgot is, is that.

    15. CHChris Hayes38:00

        No, that's cool.

    16. AMAntonio García Martínez38:00

        Anyway, just as, 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.

    17. CHChris Hayes38:07

        No, and I think, I mean, the, the, the thing about the Apple Vision and VR 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

15. 38:18 – 41:47

    Commodifying Every Second

    1. CHChris Hayes38:18

       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. Um, w- if we keep them awake a little longer, we can get more out of it. We start going to children. We can go... We've 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, uh, uh... You've discovered these, like, new deep sea [chuckles] reserves, right? That, that no one had before that 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, and commodify it in a way that wasn't before. And, 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.

    2. AMAntonio García Martínez39:20

       Well, it's-- But it's only gonna be waking hours, Chris, sixteen hours. We're gonna need full Neuralink that can put run ads inside your dreams, actually, to succeed.

    3. CHChris Hayes39:26

       No [laughs] literally, but that's, that's-

    4. AMAntonio García Martínez39:27

       We're gonna need, we're gonna need the full twenty-four, um, yeah.

    5. CHChris Hayes39:30

       That's the point [laughs] . It's like the frontiers, like, are, you know... There's a certain rapaciousness here.

    6. AMAntonio García Martínez39:36

       What is funny... No, well, of course, there is, and I, I concede that the ad tech industry is completely rapacious. Towards the end of Chaos Monkeys, or I think in the, like, afterword that I wrote in the second edition or whatever it was, I mentioned that, like, Facebook is running out of people, right [laughs] ?

    7. CHChris Hayes39:49

       Exactly, right, yeah.

    8. AMAntonio García Martínez39:50

       Um, 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 [chuckles] right?

    9. CHChris Hayes40:01

       Yeah, and you-

    10. AMAntonio García Martínez40:01

        Um, yeah

    11. CHChris Hayes40:01

        ... 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-

    12. AMAntonio García Martínez40:11

        Abundance, I think is what we call them these days. Abundance, Chris, abundance [laughs] .

    13. CHChris Hayes40:14

        Uh, yes, d-distinct from that in some ways. 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 h- you hit up against and what it does to people. And, you know, y-y-you could create a company that was just provided a useful service and printed money for a long time [laughs] . And, and in some ways, Google had that for a long time. Like, they, 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 [chuckles] 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

16. 41:47 – 45:25

    Growth, Collapse, and the Open Web’s Future

    1. CHChris Hayes41:47

       of growth revenue model collapses the open web. Like, what, what, you know, what, what is left? The stuff that's actually being used to create all that useful information, who's gonna maintain that if, if the whole thing collapses?

    2. AMAntonio García Martínez42:04

       Yeah, I think I cite Edward Abbey in, in Chaos Monkeys, an epigraph in there somewhere, that, "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." [laughs]

    3. CHChris Hayes42:10

       Right, exactly. Yes, exactly.

    4. AMAntonio García Martínez42:12

       K-kinda true. I mean, yeah, it's funny. I, I cite The Abundance Agenda, which, you know, is Ezra's and Derek's book-

    5. CHChris Hayes42:17

       Yeah

    6. AMAntonio García Martínez42:17

       ... that basically is telling the left, "Okay, d-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-

    7. CHChris Hayes42:33

       Yeah

    8. AMAntonio García Martínez42:33

       ... and doesn't actually necessarily tell usWhat is good? The summum 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, I think Peter Thiel famously asked, you know, asked the question, "We were promised flying cars and we got 140 characters."

    9. CHChris Hayes42:46

       I'll, 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 [chuckles] for energy, you know, before the Industrial Revolution, right? Like, w- 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 [laughs] 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 'cause it's not that lucrative, I think, in the end. But also it's not that attentionally salient in the way that AI is, and so you do have this weird thing happening which is like all the CapEx, all the attention's like the future technology, the epic defining technology's gonna 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 c-contrast that with the fact that, like, right now we're in the midst of an epochal transformation [chuckles] in how we get energy, and it's just, like, not that sexy.

    10. AMAntonio García Martínez44:31

        You didn't mention nuclear, Chris. Nuclear might have 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 gonna be nuts, [laughs] right?

    11. CHChris Hayes44:41

        Yeah, that's right. That, yes. That, those two things combined, like, might be, like, within, like, pretty clo- And obviously they're related, right? 'Cause the energy consumption on the compute is enormous.

    12. AMAntonio García Martínez44:53

        Yep. Yep.

    13. CHChris Hayes44:53

        And, and you need the... You, you're gonna need the build-out. Um, but if you got to that point, it's like, Jesus, what does that even look like? I don't know. [laughs]

    14. ETErik Torenberg45:02

        Ch- Chris, I know, I know you gotta run, so thank you so much for coming on, on the, on the podcast. The book is The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

    15. CHChris Hayes45:11

        I really enjoyed that. Thanks so much. [upbeat music]

Episode duration: 45:33