The Ledger, every show

“X very clearly has an objective other than attention, which is the political project of its owner. You know what I mean? So like, there's a place where like, yes, that attention is being aggregated for a specific political process. Project. That political proj…”

“What it did was it created a kind of political power That then created financial rewards on the backside, because once you get Donald Trump elected, all of a sudden everyone wants to be your buddy, and your stock price goes up.”

“I don't think that's a crazy idea. I mean, I don't want the Chinese model for a lot of things, but you know, there are some, certain things the Chinese are pretty good at. I think that we can, if we can regulate, you know, the argument I make in the book about…”

“I sort of think like the whole thing is about to collapse. I think there's just a huge pollution problem, and I think that, you know, the treatment of spam in the book is, you know, the sort of signature pollution of attention capitalism of the attention age.”

“The reason fame makes people go crazy is because we're not conditioned properly to deal with social attention from strangers. What we have done is democratize the madness of fame for everyone. Now everyone can have an inflow of social attention from strangers …”

“And I basically think that the TikTok model, which is like short form video married to machine learning is the, like, The way that slot machines outcompete everything on a casino floor, I just think that, like, outcompetes everything.”

“There's a little bit of the, this reversing, like, what will sell out there? What will get attention? And then you reverse engineer and make that content, as opposed to, I have this to say. I want to write this poem. I want to make this song, like, I want to m…”

“Biden was old and inflation was high. It gets you, like, 85% of the way there, the causal story, and I think if you look across basically every democracy holding elections in the post-COVID age of inflation, the penalty against incumbency was, like, high range…”

“It totally alienates you from what you want to pay attention to.”

“Fundamentally there's something irreducibly human and That people are going to just rebel, but basically will rebel against slop”

“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 are not, it's not, no…”

“Increasingly, there is this kind of homogenization happening where, you know, all sort of rural folks of certain demographics more and more vote like each other and also kind of like listen to the same music and have the same kind of Omniculture.”

“For all of that being true, it's amazing how sort of bad schlocky and ineffective most internet advertising is.”

“And that's why VR is so important from that, because If you have it literally every second, you've just unlocked this enormous new landscape of, like, you've discovered these, like, new deep sea reserves, right? That, that no one had before the now, every, lit…”

“And in some ways with the use of AI, like, you know, the entire open web that was the basis for the first iteration of Google is collapsing underneath it.”

“Partly because it's not that lucrative, I think in the end. But also it's not that intentionally salient in the way that AI is.”

“A reporter at the New York Times is insulated from that. Like, they have a salary. Their livelihood doesn't go up or down. Like, there's a certain degree to which traffic is a coin of the realm institutionally, but they don't have, like, a direct monetary ince…”

“The TikTok algorithm has no purpose other than that attentional purpose. And this is true even of, like, media companies, even NBC News or ABC News or Hollywood producers and directors. Like, they want big hits, yes, but they're also human beings that have, li…”

“I don't, in some ways I don't think what Musk is doing is that different than what Rupert Murdoch has done. Are both attentional plays, right?”

“Most of the platforms are seeing declines in daily active users. WhatsApp is going up. Snapchat, eh, but, like, most of them are going down.”

“I think people are going to start to turn off from the algorithms, from TikTok. Like, we're leading towards a moment of rejection where people are going to want something different.”

“So I think one of the interesting critiques of ad tech is that, like, it's still a lot more opaque than you would imagine. The answer to this question, like, are, like, there's a lot of indications that there's just a lot of chum and maybe fraud, fraud's a leg…”

“Trump's core insight is that attention's the most valuable resource, and getting it at all costs is the best way to dominate politics, and he's set himself to doing that in a bunch of novel ways.”

“I think Musk has been changed by it more than Trump has. I think, well, no, I just think he's been this way from an early time. For a long time. Whereas Musk, there's an interesting, over the trajectory of his career, it was very hard to, like, get Musk to tal…”

“Even though this has been very effective for him so far, he's about to learn a little bit more about the downside risk.”

“If you thought about something like that hard cap, right, which is totally content independent, that it would be in a similar constitutional space.”

“Where attention pulls 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?”

“Like one of the things about online success is that it's not a batting average. It's like your total number of hits.”

“The move from public posting to group chat is, I think, a hundred percent driven by that, right? So like, You know, 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 …”

“Football's really the only thing left that sort of everyone pays attention to together.”

“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.”

“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 kind of creates this kind of Surreal new genre of like pure attentional drug, like the slot…”

“I think it's possible to do good work in any medium. Like, there are people who do great stuff on TikTok, great stuff on Instagram Reels. There are people posting on Blue Sky and X and Threads that I, like, learn from. There are amazing YouTube videos that I'v…”

“One of the things you learn is that attention and attentional flows and interest are these sort of forces that are outside your control. They kind of, like, move in and out like the wind, and then you try to do with them what you can.”

“The better you are, the more you can do obscure topics. I think now that I've done this for 12 years, I'm probably better at getting people's attention for things that they wouldn't otherwise pay attention to. I think Rachel Maddow is, like, amazing at doing t…”

“Just because you have these sort of algorithmically optimized versions of our attention on one, in one channel, doesn't mean that all the other appetites go away.”

“I always compare it to food a lot because I think attention and hunger function similarly. They're like, they're both biological inheritances, but also reflections of our deep identity as humans. And, you know, I think we're kind of in the, like, late seventie…”

“There's a big gender divide in that experiment, there's a psychology experiment at the University of Virginia, where like, it's like one-third of women choose to shock themselves, and two-thirds of men.”

“Sports betting right now which we know is, you know, rocketing up in use, and also has an enormous, probably nine-to-one gender divide in who's using it.”

“No one, no networks ever had a billion viewers. Like, you're just, you just have never operated at that scale before. Like, these platforms operate at a scale that no one's ever seen before.”