YouSaid · the spoken record

Antonio García Martínez

lines on the record: 63
first: 2025-07-30
most recent: 2025-07-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Like within pretty close, and obviously they're related, right? Because the energy consumption on the computer is enormous. You're going to need the build out. But if you got to that point, Jesus, what does that even look like? I don't know.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Didn't mention nuclear crisis, nuclear matter will be part of the portfolio, but I agree with you that having basically at the margin intelligence and at the margin free energy is not. Yeah, that's right.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“End But also, it's not that intentionally salient in the way that AI is. And so you do have this weird thing happening, which is like all the CapEx, all the attentions, like the future technology, the epic defining technology is going to be AI. And I don't know if I agree with that or not. I understand why people, some people think that's true. I understand some of the skepticism. But it's interesting to contrast that with the fact that right now we're in the midst of an apocalypse transformation in how we get energy. And it's just not that sexy.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll say this on that last point. It's interesting to me to compare The amount of CapEx and media attention to AI versus the kind of insane solar power revolution happening right now. Because it's a little like the flying car 140 character thing. Like we've been burning carbon for energy before the Industrial Revolution, right? Like we've been burning trees for wood stoves 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 kind of reclaim the abundance to use a word of the sun. They write about that in the book a bit. Like that is such a wildly revolutionary thing to happen. And partly because it's not that lucrative.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of true. I mean, yeah, it's funny. I cite the abundance agenda, which is Ezra's and Derek's book that basically is telling the left, okay, don't be dumb about capitalism and growth. Like it could actually be a good thing, right? And I think there's another book by Alex Carp of Palantir called The Technological Republic that's basically telling the right, look, I mean, the market isn't actually the solution to everything and doesn't actually necessarily tell us. What is good? The sumbona. Like, what are the ultimate good ends of social life? The market isn't necessarily there to answer that question. I mean, I think PRT will famously ask the question, we're promised flying cars and we got 140 characters.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I can't risk a hallucination. And so what I need to do is I need to check everything against like, did a person report this? Did a human being go and call this person? Is that name right? And I do wonder that we're all entering into once the kind of... Growth revenue model collapses the open web. Like what is left? The stuff that's actually being used to create all that useful information, who's going to maintain that if the whole thing collapses?”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, distinct from that in some ways. But I guess my point would be. There are these fundamental tensions between The need for endless growth and what boundaries you hit up against and what it does to people. You could create a company that was just provided a useful service and printed money for a long time. And in some ways, Google had that for a long time. Like they had a genuinely useful service. It genuinely transformed how we got information. It was insanely profitable. It 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 the entire open web that was the basis for the first iteration of Google is collapsing underneath it. And what comes after when you talk about this sort of interface we have with the AI chatbot, I find that for my work, the only way that I can use AI is with web search on and telling it to cite everything.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I made the joke that they'd start breeding new humans just to become Facebook users to sell the ads or something, which obviously is ridiculous. But I think it's a similar concept that there's actually only so many attention hours in the day, right? Yeah.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, of course, there is. I can see that the att tech industry is completely rapacious. Towards the end of chaos monkeys, or I think in the like afterward that I wrote in the second edition or whatever it was, I mentioned that Facebook is running out of people, right? Exactly.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, that's cool. No, and I think the thing about the Apple Vision and VR to me is, and I write at some length in Siren's call about this, like at a certain point, if you're thinking about this commodity and you come up against these hard limits, right? So at a certain point, it's like, okay, we have people looking at their phones as much as they possibly can. If we keep them awake a little longer, we can get more out of it. If we start going to children, we can go, we sold the 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. You've discovered these new deep sea reserves, right? That no one had before. And now literally every second, right? If it's on every waking second, you can now mine that attention and extract and commodify it in a way that wasn't before because Apple did this once before with the smartphone as the crucial piece of hardware to massively expand that supply.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a paper from Yahoo Research in 2001 or 2 or something in which they used the multiple iron bandit problem, which precedes advertising, obviously, but then they adapt it. Because if you look at a page, there's several bandits there, right? Which different ads. And if you click on one, there's a chance of it leading to a conversion or not. And a lot of the math behind this one I forgot is that as a side footnote, I think look at the Apple vision as an example, right? It's like way too bulky. It's way too expensive. It's not quite good enough yet.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Surreal new genre of pure attentional drug, like the slot machine that people just watch and doesn't have any real meaning because it's just this complete neural network produced hive mind creation or people just opt for humans and it doesn't really change it that much anyway. Those seem like the three big options.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you get that screen time notification on your phone, right? What you're doing is you're looking a lot of it is not booking flights and doing stuff. Some of it is. But what it does to that part of it is sort of the big, I don't have the answer. I don't think anyone has the answer. I think if you had the answer, you could probably make a fortune with the right bet. But I just don't know what it's going to do there. The place we started, 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 gets so good that it creates this kind of”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree that there are these very obvious to me use cases, incredibly useful cases of if it gets good enough, particularly the sort of agentic idea that you're describing there. There's lots of stuff. And the idea of it essentially becoming in the way the browser was like the sort of interface being the thing that you're talking to, right? But that's to do all the useful stuff, right? My question is like, what does it do?”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think we were at the tail end of that. I still have to memorize Shakespeare's Medicine High School, which I got anyway. Have to do anywhere. 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, I don't think they're human, by the way. I think everyone who thinks they're human is crazy. But I talk to it as if it were a human because that's actually the best way to interface with it. And you engage in this sort of Socratic dialogue with it, trying to get an answer. Sometimes the AI bot gets crazy and hallucinates. I mean, so do humans. And you kind of have to put it back on the right course. But I think that's the thing, right? And talking to the human. And when you manage to map that to like e-commerce or travel, when I can say, I want to go, which I do, go to France for a week in August to see my daughter and spend a week in Brittany. So book me in Airbnb, book me a flight and make it not cost more than $3,000 if that's impossible. And just give me a button that says go and do it. I mean, I would literally bet large portions of my net worth in time. That's the future. That's going to be the gateway. AI is going to upstream everything about consumer experience.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The oral phase, which Neil Postman writes about it a lot, that was very mnemonic, right? It was very memory intensive. People had these sort of 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 of stored in the brain.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 the thought that we're going to be reading a 6,000 word thought piece in The New Yorker. I doubt most young people can even do that anymore. I can barely do it, actually, even though I used to do it regularly. I force myself to do it, which is weird, but it doesn't mean we're going back to an oral phase in which we're going to be citing Homer and... Iambic pentameter or something”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What the next basically we've seen these sort of movements from text-based to video. And if there's something after that, like basically what the next big thing is, what is the next bite dance that does to TikTok, what TikTok sort of did to the incumbents and Facebook and stuff like that”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if it's like a thing to answer. Just like it's so striking to me that that's the case. And particularly how much that still dominates these sort of older media that still, when you watch a big sports game on a broadcast, if you're watching Sunday football, right? And there also that scale that is very hard to replicate with. TikTok, to your point about how scalable the TikTok stuff is like if you... Nifty little gizmo that you can drop shift from China and you have low overhead, you can sell it to a small number of people on TikTok. That's not the way you're going to sell a Ford F-150. So there's a sort of interesting scale question there. But I also just wonder like”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally true. I mean, there's TikTok, there's an app called Whatnot. I mean, it's basically people stumping for a product and then buying from it. I think it works for D2C brands, right? Very niche brands that people associate with and buy very easily. I mean, you're absolutely correct. That's the whole point of brand advertising, right? Again, to use more ad tech ease, high LTV, high lifetime value, right? 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 a lifetime value. I'm not sure I don't know what the answer is. Yeah.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. That's right. Well, so here's my question. This strikes me a lot. So, when you're on TikTok, right, TikTok is pretty ad heavy these days. And I'm always struck that every ad feels like something from the home shopping network or like infomercial, I would see it like 5.30 a.m. before cartoons came on on a Saturday morning in my youth. And I just, I keep thinking to myself, I'm like, why isn't progressive auto assurance or GM serving me ads here if this ad tech works? Why are the people that spend like the most amount of money on advertising and for whom this is particularly true for brands like car brands and insurance brands where there's unbelievable continuity, right? People just keep the same thing. And that's why traditionally, right, the younger demographics in advertising were so valuable. You want to sell someone their first Toyota because they're just going to buy Toyotas after that. So you're really purchasing a lifetime of purchases. So if that's the case and young people on TikTok, it's like, if this is such an effect.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jump on a website, it's based on a cookie, and that's so transient these days that it's basically meaningless, so there's just a lot of practical problems. And again, it's funny, I actually did a story for Wired about it because it pissed me off so much. You know, the whole conspiracy theory that Zuck is listening to you through your phone or whatever”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, it's a good point. I mean, it's funny. This isn't going to take us way back last time when I was on your show, probably, because it's probably what I was on for. The whole Cambridge Analytica scandal. Exactly. That's right. You don't need to go down the rabbit hole. It's a whole story. Everyone's probably heard as much as they want to hear about it. There's no way to do that, right? And any media buyer will tell you that a lot of ads are still crap. And it's true. It's still kind of a statistical phenomenon. Just to put numbers on it, the CTR, the click-through rate, like how often a user engages on a thing like Instagram, at least 97% of people who looked at it were just completely indifferent to the thing, right? And just didn't engage. Yeah, I mean, look, you can really do a technical deep dive there. I mean, yes, that data is out there, but a lot of it's super fragmented. And it often exists in varying silos. And then there is grift and bullshit to be blunt in advertising, but we'll sell you data that it'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 Triss Hayes or the same Antonio that shows up on the app every time. So they kind of know when you...”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which drives towards ever more individual, but that individuation fails in really interesting ways. Can I ask you a question, Antonio? Because I'm really curious about this. So to me, one of the big unsolved questions that I never quite wrestled to the ground. I talk a little bit about this notion of like subprime attention. It's like there's sort of two different ways of looking at ad tech to oversimplify. One is that it has all this incredibly personalized data that no advertiser has ever had access to. It's not just talking to a generic man head of household in the 50s. It's talking to like you Chris Hayes, I know where you live and what you do and how would you make and like what your medications are, right? That allows at a level of sophistication and optimization that's never been possible before. And then the other side of this is like for all of that being true, it's amazing how sort of bad schlocky and ineffective most internet advertising is. And I think there's some...”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, this question of how the sort of individuation of the current attention marketplace and how it relates to what we share and what we don't share is like there's just a bunch of really interesting questions in there, some of which, again, like the point you were making before about like I found my people on the internet, like 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, it's incredible, right? And that's true for a million different ways of being that you might be as a teenager 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”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, write the memory back to the same place that the app would start running fast again. And so what he feels is happening. And of course, he believes in this thing called the network state, is that we're basically defragmenting reality, right? And what we need to solve this is take all the people that think like each other and get them back in the same state and in some sense defrag the disk. I think the realities of that are a little challenging. But it's an interesting thought experiment to imagine that if you were to do that in some magical way, then you would end up with a holy red and a holy blue country or something.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That serves whatever like farm to table like gastropub food. It's interesting that these sort of omnicultures supplant localism in this moment when we don't have massness as the sort of central cultural feature”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It used to be the case that rural Mississippi and rural Minnesota just voted very, very differently. And that's because the people that occupied those places had different ethnic backgrounds. And Minnesota was like Scandinavian socialists, but also different religious traditions, Southern Baptists versus Lutheran. And there were all these defining sort of geographic features of different places that would show up in politics. And increasingly, there is this kind of homogenization happening where all sort of rural folks of certain demographics more and more vote like each other and also listen to the same music and have the same kind of omniculture. And that's also true of sort of big city college educated upper middle class folks where like you could go to the cool neighborhood in Columbus and there's going to be some restaurant called like Stern and STEM.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 the lack of sort of geographical distinction.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Forget they did Ireland recently family and the kids same argument as in the US versus if you had visited Ireland 20 years ago you wouldn't be able to understand them because they spoke in a dialect that would be unintelligible to marketers”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Allegoric resonance that everyone is then talking about or everyone does, particularly in Gen Z, like reference or even the way that people talk, like this sort of brain rot Gen Z way of talking is really interesting to me because that does seem recognizably mass, right? In the same way the 1960s, it was like far out and groovy and all these things that like there is this really distinct argot of Gen Z, but they're getting it all not from mass culture, but from basically algorithmic social media. That to me is super fascinating because there's something that's enduring beneath the kind of technological or institutional layers of how culture is being mediated and how attention is being captured and bought and sold.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Although, what's also interesting to me, too, and I'm always curious about the tech, I feel like I don't have a great sense actually of, and maybe you guys have a better sense of this. I think A, it's very funny. We refer to the algorithm as a definite article. Like it's sort of totemic or almost like a deity, like the algorithm served me this. 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 that. It's like I probably could have coded that. It'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 the book, like taking a gummy and like realizing that it's just showing me pictures of sandwiches. And after like 30 minutes of just looking, it was like, oh, it knows that I'm high. Like that's a kind of magic. One of the things I think is interesting is there will be these kinds of things that go viral or have this kind of like.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then, like, the whole free thing. Yeah. Right. Everyone had, and it's a great book, by the way. I like Franz as a writer. Everyone had to read that damn book. And since then, it's never been the case that everyone's read the same book at all. Yeah. I mean, with the possible exception of David Foster Wallace and Infinite Jazz, but it's one of those books everyone claims to read, but no one's actually read. I think people actually did read the corrections. And yeah, it's weird because if you talk to like Gen Xers, and particularly I think people like, again, Mark, who came from... Maybe not like poor mainstream America. What they always say about the internet is like, oh, I finally found my people. Like, I was interested in whatever, some weird little niche obsession that in your little Midwestern town, there's nobody doing it.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and elections, although we pay attention to such different ways, but I do think there's something lost in that. And I don't know how to get a background. And I'm also fully aware it might just be like, I'm 46 and I'm just succumbing to the nostalgia of middle age.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About a public, right, is paying attention to the same thing together. And I've even come to feel like weirdly old man nostalgic for the Super Bowl or when everyone's talking about Love Island because it feels like, oh, here's a thing that everyone is paying. I'm not watching Love Island, but I know that everyone is. And 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, particularly if you're Gen X and you thought to yourself as sort of alternative in whatever way that like that was stultifying mass culture and middle brow. But I've come to miss that because I think it's the thing we're sort of missing, which is everyone, football's really the only thing left, the sort of everyone pays attention to together.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clear the way it is. What's really interesting, too, is to think about it from it being the opposite problem because so much of what happens in sort of the 20s and 30s particularly when you have sort of huge mass broadcast mediums that can sort of capture attention at scale, right? Is that you have sort of this opposite problem, right, which is like the problem of the mass media and this is something that Lippmann encounters when he has a job basically propagandizing for entrance into World War I, which is that, whoa, this is an insanely powerful tool. And you can blast out messages at scale to all these people and get them all thinking the same way or moving the needle in some way. And that was a problem that Lippmann wrestles with and all sorts of different folks wrestle with. And now we have the opposite problem, right? There is no getting anything like that. I mean, I've even come to feel one way to think.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And again, I think it's the subtext of 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 tension between the physical and, I wouldn't say spiritual necessarily, but the intellectual, is at the heart of all, I think the nation state is cracking up in a way just to get Dumar for a hot second. And I think the internet's definitely behind part of it because you don't have the sense of collective consensus that the media and TV, for example, used to create during the Cronkite era, used to have some level of synchrony or synergy that would happen with Cronkite Sane. And that's the way it is. And somehow now I scroll my feet versus blue sky. And it's like, no, I don't know what the way it is, actually. It's not pretty clear the way it is.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I think our friend Mark Andreessen, that you might know, Eric, his is the A and the sign behind you, famously said that some people are reality privileged, right? Some people are wealthy enough or live in a certain context in which they don't need the VR headset, right? Because like their life is good enough, they don't need it, but everyone else gets the VR headset. And so how do you strike that balance between the digital versus the real versions of it? But I think what happens is”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, one take on that, Chris. I mean, just to give you the view from the crypto trenches, because I work at a crypto company, BruteTratch is actually huge in the crypto space. It's usually on Telegram, which is an app that most normal people don't use, or most Americans don't use, certainly. And there you actually either pay to enter the group chat or some apps have actually literally tokenized being able to go into the group chat. So you have to buy so many of the token. And then the owner of the group chat, who's the guy who's leaking the alpha, because this is all very speculative, right? The token represents his value. There's a company called Frentech 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 as part of it. But I think the lesson there is that if you overfinancialize things, it loses the social side of it, which crypto does a lot, right? AI is everything is computer and crypto everything money, like literally everything. But yeah, I agree with you. I mean, one place I'd maybe quibble to you a little bit, or I guess I don't know, I'm confused myself. I think the world we're heading to, the digital version of things is like the mainstream premium economy version of the world.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But to your point, I totally agree about this sort of reclaiming kind of community or reclaiming like dumb bar numbers or IRL reactions or what I say in the book is that normal relationships are born of bilateral exchanges of social attention, right? As opposed to unilateral, right? That's the way we're all conditioned to work. And the question is, it's not a particularly lucrative tech to reclaim. And that to me is the question of 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.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, well, what's right? So what's the sort of sustaining business model of the group chat is an interesting one. Now, obviously, WhatsApp, which Meta owns, is incredibly valuable company. I mean, incredibly valuable division of Meta, their signal, which is fascinating because it is a nonprofit and I think a really interesting model in that respect.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That I explored in the book and I'm writing about now in relation to AI, but like we tend to conflate, particularly in this era, like useful tech and lucrative tech. And those are not like there's technologies that are incredibly useful that are not particularly lucrative, like penicillin right now, like antibiotics. No one's making enormous fortunes off them. Even solar power, which is arguably the most useful technology of our age, is a perfectly profitable enterprise, but no one's making Rockefeller fortunes off of solar right now. And then there's technologies that are incredibly lucrative but not particularly socially useful. The fan duel DraftKing tech is really good tech 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 digital space that is so dominated only by commercial options.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 where is the revenue in that model? And this is sort of the interesting question, right? This is something I'm really obsessed with. And it's the germ of something”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My group cats, often professional, right? Like I'm in a group chat with Eric and we're a lot of people that have worked together or invested to those companies. And you can't be that much of a dick to be blunt because you'll take a hit for it, right? So it's self-regulating. And I think to me, if I was to propose a solution to our current blind, it's not less technology and like a Butlerian jihad against this thing. I think it's using technology in some way to recreate.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a very small town. And so the reality is everyone's famous in that neighborhood and that everyone knows who everyone is and their family. And so if you did something totally crazy and like off the bend, you'd still catch health for it. To be cool, like you wouldn't get away with it. And so a lot of our focus on privacy. In fact, this is historically China. This is a bit of a rabbit hole. I don't know if you want to go down on Eric, but you look at the history of privacy, and again, Chris, I'm sure you study these topics. Louis Bryne does basically created in 1890 with this sort of disquisition called the right to privacy that he more or less invented, by the way. The word privacy doesn't appear once in the Constitution. And the reason why is because 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 urban living where you were losing this ability to actually know everybody. And anyhow, long wind up to getting to, I think the group chat phenomenon, not everybody can join the group chat, there's an admin, right? If someone gets like completely out of control, they get booted. And then everyone kind of knows everyone. So like, you don't really want to piss people off because there's typically some theme.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's not public space is one of the sort of bigger trends happening. I think precisely because of how warping and disquieting it is to be in this kind of digital panopticon and the subject of near constant total surveillance and social attention.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do have that awareness that, for instance, if I screamed at a car that cut me off, you know, or like almost hit me as it was rounding the corner and like people might know that was me and associate with me. So there is that kind of behavioral modification part of it too. But there's also something profoundly warping about it psychologically. And I think it is true that that point you just made, though, is a really interesting one. There is some kind of pro-social effect, right? Of like not wanting to be like a complete maniac in public because that might go viral or something. Is an interesting pro-social aspect of it, but I also think there's something so warping about it. And one of the things that, and I quote this in the book, the move from public posting to group chat is, I think, 100% driven by that, right? So more and more of all the traffic 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 basically to kind of reclaim a private space.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think one of the things I write about in the book a lot is sort of the effects of social attention and social attention on you and what it does and that democratization of fame as a genuinely new phenomenon that's sort of different from past eras. And I think you're right. Like it is behavior modifying. And for me, I have the experience of actually, again, fame is always totally relative. Different people are famous in different places. But like, you know, people recognize me on the street.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Line, yeah, yeah, and the fact that everyone carries themselves like they are a Kardashian everywhere they go. I mean, just as like a tourist in Europe, the fact that literally you have a line of people taking selfies in front of the thing, right, is already like people are imagining themselves already under the spotlight. And as a side thing, like yesterday, I work at a tech company, it's very young, and I think the one thing the zoomers themselves cited is that like, well, you feel like you're being observed all the time, right? Everyone is like a celebrity who goes out in the wild. And if you yell out a waiter or you do something stupid, which we've all done, by the way, right? Suddenly you can become insuffamous for it and nobody wants that. And I just, and again, Chris, you and I are probably old enough to remember that before times when we were young, dumb kids, if you didn't go to jail and didn't go to the hospital, it didn't happen, right? It was gone. I mean, maybe it remains as like local lore, but it never got bigger than that. You weren't really worried about anything, right? And somehow that's.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 actually started reading based on your recommendation, actually. It's a great book,”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source