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

“Does that start to overwhelm everything? Because you can just do I can't make a thousand videos a day. But, you know, 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? Using that automation. It's just 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 it's going to do to the existing models for these platforms.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. I mean, it's a batting average if you're trying to make a living, right? And you only have so much time. But Mr. Beast talks about this. Other people talk about it too. Always be posting and see what works. And sometimes you could post the same things 15 times and one time it takes off and other times it doesn't. If you're thinking about it as this quantity game, right? And this is where the sort of brute force spam analogy comes in. If you're automating a thousand videos every day and just throwing them at the algorithm for sort of content farming purposes,”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've had a slot problem before AI. I mentioned LinkedIn earlier in terms of how fake that network feels, but also on Instagram, right? Like people have Finstas, fake Instagrams for reason. So this idea of who you present yourself as and who you actually are, what you actually think has been a problem of social networks for a while. And it's not obvious to me that AI will make the problem worse in terms of accelerating or emphasizing either fake stuff or stuff that people don't want to be. Engaging with why are you so convinced that it will expand that gap between what we want to be engaging with and what we actually engage with?”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The defining metaphor of the book, The Sirens call Odysseus on the mast, sort of 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 think I have the same faith as you that fundamentally there's something irreducibly human and that people are going to just rebel. Basically, we'll rebel against slop, which I think brings us back to this first question, which I do think is really interesting, which is if the slop overruns it, what does that mean for the platforms, right? And is it something that they have to start actively managing in the same way that at scale somewhere like Twitter, right, they started to have to deal with a bunch of really difficult content moderation questions that were tough calls where they're trying to create a user experience that is not going to repel people and is going to attract advertisers? And I do wonder if AI.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, thanks for the kind words. I appreciate it, especially because I'm not a practitioner in ad tech, and so much of the story is sort of an ad tech story. I mean, I think deeper than ad tech, ad tech is sort of epiphenomenal to the story. So it's really gratifying to hear that from someone who's worked in it. And yeah, like I've had the exact same experience. Again, the sort of.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the challenge there is what you put, Chris, which by the way, I think it's time we should just plug Chris's book. I think you wrote a phenomenal book, actually. And I would recommend it to all my tech people. And one of the things you cite is to use the marketing speak acquisition and retention are different things, right? It's one thing to acquire attention. I think you cite the example of someone going into a room and firing a gun in the air. Well, you've acquired attention. But then how do you maintain it? And even with the guy with a gun in his hand, it might be a little hard to maintain it. And that's the challenge. And if you're a sophisticated marker, you realize it's not just about acquisition. It's about the retention side of it. I don't know. A positive side of me thinks humans aren't going to sit there and stare at the slop all day. That said, I've used TikTok and like a meth head, like getting into a fenty fold on the street. Like I emerged two hours later. I'd come to. And what the hell just happened? And then I delete the app from my phone because I never want to do that again. Yeah. So that's maybe the counter-argument.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does AI from the generative perspective and AI from the machine learning algorithmic perspective so ruthlessly optimize for that former what you will pay attention to, it totally alienates you from the latter what you want to pay attention to. And if it does do that, do people stick with it or do they reach some point where they feel too alienated from what they want to be spending their time doing?”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty obsessed right now with AI slop and particularly these sort of subgenres that feel like what's funny about a lot of AI is that it doesn't actually feel that sophisticated. It just feels like reverse engineered in a way that you can trace. I mean, not all of it, right? But some of it does. 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 do well, right? And so there's this whole universe of AI babies singing, bless the Lord, O my soul. And there was one I saw yesterday that's like Jesus with a baby. They're both singing bless the Lord all my soul. And Jesus is holding a disembodied foot, which is just like signature AI slop. To me, the sort of question about all this stuff is one of the theses of the book is that there's this kind of disconnect between what we will pay attention to and in some volitional sense what we want to pay attention to. And the question is,”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, yes and no. I mean, you're seeing it in the four Utah Twitter already, right? And maybe I would think this because I was creator paid for my creations, I guess, to some degree. But I think a lot of it is empty and sterile. And I think humans who are able to be creative and use AI tools correctly will have superpowers.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I guess the question becomes like is the AI social media content generated actually. Compelling enough that it doesn't feel like spam and it just dislocates all human creators. Do people not like it? So the algorithmic stops serving it up or does it overwhelm the experience in a way that starts to feel like the way that our inboxes feel?”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like I would probably have more to learn from you guys than you have from me. So I'm happy to talk, and maybe I'll ask you some questions. I sort of think like the whole thing is about to collapse. I think there's just a huge pollution problem. And I think that the treatment of spam in the book is the sort of signature pollution of attention capitalism, of the attention age. If it's lucrative to aggregate lots of attention where attention pools and collects, there will be money. And to the extent that you can cheaply automate the extraction of that attention, even if it's done in a sort of like brute force, wasteful way, there's going to be spam. So 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 AI content creation now puts that at scale for all the social media platforms.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The prize for beating Matlesius in the substack rankings. I'm not anti Matt, but we were briefly among the top 10 or 15 step stackers on a revenue basis, Circa like 2021. And he was definitely a comp, I guess. Him and Andrew Solomon were definitely the winners of that race.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Antonio is a longtime friend and collaborator of mine. We have a show. Well, Antonio, why don't you briefly introduce yourself? Yeah, I started in AdTech, I guess, in 2008 in attention capitalism, as Priscilla call it, and worked at a number of startups. I was an early member of the Facebook ads team back before the IPO when the ads system was horrible. For those old enough to remember, I suspect Chris is probably in the same bucket. Facebook ads used to be these little postage stamps on the right-hand side. And then it became this huge money machine. Read a book about that time called Chaos Monkeys that came out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I included in the book. 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 to tech. And I'm ahead of this.”
2025-07-30 · a16z Podcast · AI Content and the War for Your Attention · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source