On social media, viral content driven by outrage/negativity generates approximately 10x more engagement than positive content about the same subject, creating a structural incentive for negative media coverage.

Media outlets have an economic incentive to publish negative political stories because such stories generate approximately 10 times more reach, engagement, and subscribers than positive stories about the same subject.

“If I write that article it's going to get 10 times the reach 10 times the engagement 10 times the subscribers if I write the exact opposite article.”

All highly effective viral videos since the Rodney King video start halfway through the event, omitting the run-up context.

“All of the really effective viral videos basically since then, including the ones that have been really important over the course of the last decade, they've all had that characteristic. They all start halfway through the event.”

Zach Yadegari and collaborators deliberately used Andrew Tate-style 'sell the dream, sell the lifestyle' rage-bait tactics for a course launch, which they acknowledged did not represent their actual characters.

“We decided to go the super controversial route like you said that Andrew Tate, it was like sell the dream, sell the lifestyle instead of sell the product. And it was it was interesting. I don't think it's it's definitely not a real representation of any of our characters. We very intentionally wanted to rage bait people.”

As AI agents become better at making and posting video content, spending will migrate from paid digital advertising to organic content, with the TAM for video editing labor growing from tens of billions to hundreds of billions by next year.

“Our view is that as agents get so good at making and posting video content it actually eats up the amount that's spent on digital advertising. So about $90 billion a year goes towards meta and YouTube and Tik Tok ads and those people are paying for eyeballs. Our view is actually that like a lot of that spending is going to migrate to organic content and it's going to migrate to paying agents for like, you know, the TAM of like video editing software or the labor budgets of video editing software, that's in the tens of billions, but quickly by next year, it'll be in the hundreds of billions in terms of how many people or how many brands are going to spend the amount of money to acquire.”