Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:29:08 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:29:08] S1: Give me like examples, like try to bring this into the reality. Is this like game that I can play in in real time that is imagined in real time? You just sort of said, like, discussion with Socrates and Aristotle as a method of learning. Give us some, like, examples to try to make this as real as possible.
00:29:33 · Cristóbal Valenzuela
[00:29:33] S0: I mean, you're you're kind of, like, heading directionally, like, into the right, like, set of examples. And maybe going back to the idea of, like, mental models and what needs to change. Like when we say a game, like there's rules and systems of what a game is, specifically when you think about a real tool or like a digital game. But like, there's opportunities for us to create a new type of experience that I call nonlinear. Nonlinear meaning like there's no beginning and end, and you can take it as an open ended world. And the only shape and form we have to do that in a digital form is a video game. But the moment you open it and have an open ended world, you can have a nonlinear experience that doesn't and may not feel like a game. Right? So it's like, if I spend six hours a day chatting with a fantastical character, that's like driving my imagination in interesting places, and it's helping me think, what is that? Is that a game? Is that a film? Is that a phone call? Is that a interaction? My position is like, well, the problem is not how, what to name it. The, the, the, the thing here is that we need to understand that experience as a net new thing. We've never been able to do such a thing in the first place. So by labeling a game, I'm actually like underestimated, you know, we might think about it like differently just because we're putting it, the mental models and the rules of what a game should be like. But if you wanna spend six hours with chatting with your your favorite philosopher and you find it entertaining and you find it the most value you've gotten from a, like media experience in a while, that's amazing. What name do we put to it? I don't know. I We'll don't figure it out. It's something important.
00:31:15 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:31:15] S1: That's a bit of your example that you started with where you were like, when we went from painting to a photograph and we tried to stretch them as the same, but they have fundamentally different, maybe, rules and applications than what you could And think about we're trying to use the labels of what we know as the world we know it. But it sounds like what you're really saying is, like, we are net new creating. This is a net new creation of a medium. Correct.
00:31:45 · Cristóbal Valenzuela, Alexa von Tobel
[00:31:45] S0: Yes. And and to to that same point, when when photography was around, to your point of labels and words, we, society didn't have the words to describe what they were seeing. And so they thought of photography as, and this is true as, as mirrors with memories, because it was, if you think about photography, it's kind of that. It's a mirror. It's reflecting reality. It's capturing reality, but it's like saving it in time. And then eventually we come up with this idea of photography and the language of photography and all the things that came after it. But it wasn't that someone was like, oh, you know what? I'm gonna invent photography. It was like a bunch of people and scientists from mid eighteen hundreds experimenting with chemicals, reactions and physical and physical materials and realizing that this... That was at the time mostly a medium to understand movement and like scientific progress was effectively meant to be used as storytelling. I think the most compelling use cases of cameras these days is storytelling. And, and then maybe there's an argument to be said that all technologies are somehow a form of storytelling eventually. And I think this case is actually very similar, which is like AI is just becoming another form of storytelling and, you know, our continuous evolution of storytelling as a as a society altogether. [00:32:55] S1: Let's dream a bit about the future of advertising. [00:32:58] S0: Sure.
00:32:58 · Cristóbal Valenzuela, Alexa von Tobel
[00:32:58] S0: Sure. [00:32:59] S1: And I remember a thesis talk that I watched you give, and it's so easy when you can see some of the videos, and you're just like, wow. Oh my god. Like, the advertising could foundationally just change for us. Can you just talk a little bit about kind of what you see the future of advertising could look like?
00:33:19 · Cristóbal Valenzuela
[00:33:19] S0: Well, it depends on the scale and then the timescale that you're thinking about. There... There's a world where you can think about, well, what happens if you just keep extrapolating the... And and thinking about the obvious next iteration of where the signal is going? Advertisers and advertising, if you think about it from a base level, it's also about, it's a story. It's, it's someone wants to tell your story you can buy into that story and hopefully buy a product or a service. Right. That that's the goal. And the tricky part is, well, what story do you tell? How do you tell that story? Where do you put that story? And that's, that's marketing, that's distribution. That's like ads. Right. There's not going to be a world, if I can, if I can run that process automatically in a personalized way, hyper specific, I can create the most compelling stories for you to engage with my product or service. And I can do it in such a way that I'm probably like skipping any intermiliary, any step in between that will allow me to get to my audience the fastest. And I think a lot of people are thinking about this, which is if you're already watching a screen, you're already in front of a piece of media or an ad or something, I could effectively generate something that will like immediately be specific to you. And I can do it with an agent or a combination of agents that will know what's best for you based on who you are. Now that's an extreme kind of case and there might be some benefits and some downsides of that. And, and, but I think directionally that's where the world is heading, to be honest. And advertising is not too far from being transformed at its most fundamental level because of agents being able to do all of the work that now we're doing through different people and through different companies.