# AI's Impact on Workforce, Data Licensing, and Agent Commerce

**Podcast:** Masters of Scale
**Published:** 2026-03-31

## Transcript

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On Masters of Scale, we talk a lot about inflection points, those moments when a technology stops being optional and starts being fundamental.
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They finance the entire thing.
The problem is that AI breaks that.
18 months ago, it was 20 times harder to get traffic from Google than it was 10 years ago.
Now it's 50 times harder.
It's 3500 times harder to get traffic from OpenAI than the Google of old.
65,000 times harder to get traffic from Anthropic.
Why did Sam and Elon start OpenAI?
Because they were terrified that Google was gonna run away with the whole game.
Everything is started effectively as a counterweight to Google, and that's the puzzle.
That's Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince speaking to me live on stage at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas in mid-March.
Cloudflare helps facilitate more than 20% of all online traffic, which gives Matthew unique perspective about how AI is changing the internet and the motivations of the major tech platforms.
He also shares his real-time experience on the front lines of cyber war with Iran.
This is Matthew's second appearance on the show, and he doesn't disappoint.
So please join me in uh welcoming uh Matthew Prince, CEO and uh co-founder of Cloudflare.
Yes.
These look very official.
Very official.
This is a very official gathering.
We're very official, folks.
You were on my show um six months ago.
Yep.
And and since that time, so much has changed.
You talked about how the number of new websites has grown dramatically.
After plateauing for a really long time, actually declining for a little bit, we're now seeing the fastest creation of new websites that has happened in the entire history of the web.
We have uh the number of the amount of bot traffic has gone from about 20% of all traffic to trending to 50% by 2027 and growing.
We think it'll be it'll be over half of internet traffic is generated by bots.
And and the business model of the future is unclear.
You gave this example about how even Walmart, Amazon, and Target have wildly different business models, right?
Wildly different approaches.
Walmart has said, agents are welcome, come on, come all.
Amazon is literally suing companies, and it was just successful in uh in a motion against um uh perplexity saying you are not if you're an agent allowed to shop on Amazon.com.
Two two of the smartest retailers in the world have wildly divergent strategies.
That's so rare that that happens, and I think it just shows how how uncertain everyone is about what what the future is gonna look like.
To add to all of this, we now have a uh conflict in the Middle East.
Yeah.
And and and uh yeah, and I I wanted to, well, I wanted to ask you about this because I remember when you talked to me, you said, and I'm gonna quote this: Cloudflare goes to war every day with Iranian hot hackers, Russian hackers, and North Koreans.
Now, what what is the status of that now with uh with the conflict going on?
Yeah, so it was it was it was interesting.
We um when we uh uh sometimes you we see things, we can't explain them.
But uh on February 27th, uh the attacks coming out of Iran, so uh from Iran targeting the West uh increased 7x off baseline.
So there's there's always sort of background, and then on February 27th, massive spike.
Why?
Uh we're not sure.
Like, did they get advanced warning that on the 28th US gonna start bombing?
Was it just coincidence?
Was what was going on?
We're not sure, but we did see that massive spike, usually in kinetic conflicts.
So what we saw Russia-Ukraine, we saw uh Israel Hamas, cyber proceeds and then stays elevated through the entire time of when there's uh a physical war going on, and then often lasts slightly after whenever sort of peace is declared.
Um in this case it was different.
Uh so we saw a massive spike on the 27th, and on the 28th, it dropped down to less than 10% of baseline.
So you're less than 10% of what it had been before.
What it happened before.
We think that what had happened was that the US and Israeli strikes were so effective at disrupting command and control inside of Iran that even the hackers were sort of like, we're not sure what to do.
Now that's coming back.
We've seen a dramatic uptick in Iranian attacks.
Um uh striker, when a big big Michigan-based corporation um got got completely compromised, looks like by Iranians.
I think you're gonna see a lot more of that because it is one of the things when you have sort of these asymmetric conflicts where you have a very powerful nation taking on a much weaker nation.
Cyber is one of the ways that they can strike back.
I also think that we'll see um a lot of other nation states that don't necessarily want to get uh blamed for cyber attacks.
Russia is is the is the the largest um you know offender of this.
Russia is extremely vulnerable to cyber attacks themselves.
And so I would have predicted that after the Russia-Ukraine conflict starts in February of 2022, um, that we would have seen a massive uptick in the number of of Russian cyber attacks that happened.
That has not largely happened nearly as much.
There have been some, but it's not not to the wave that we thought.
But they but part of the reason we think, and again, speculation, but part of the reason we think is because Russia itself is so vulnerable to attack that if they directly attack the U.S.
They would be they would come back at them and would shut down their entire power, um, industrial base, a lot, a lot of different different things.
And so there's sort of a mutually assured destruction uh concept to cyber.
Russian attacks really ticked up uh when Israel Hamas uh uh took off, and Russia was doing a lot to try and disguise their cyber attacks as if they were coming from Hamas or Iran.
And so I I would imagine that we're gonna see a lot of a lot more Russian attacks that will be trying again to look like Iran.
And the the efforts are sort of um degrade uh Iran's capabilities, that doesn't necessarily extend to cyber in the same way it does to other things.
Well, it's one of the internal debates at Cloudflare right now is the Iranian internet was sh is shut off.
And the question is, did they do that to themselves?
Because that's what they have historically done.
They don't they want to block it, it's a way to quell protests, a way of things, or did did the US do that to them or Israel.
Um, because uh typically in a in a again, kinetic conflict, the first thing that you do is you try to disable the communication systems of whoever you're about to bomb.
And so that would be very normal.
But but on the other hand, you know, the State Department went through extensive efforts to try and get things like uh Starlink and other things into Iran.
It's not clear entirely whether Iran shut down the internet themselves or if or if the US and Israel shut it down.
The evidence that um that they did it to themselves is that there is still uh from some cellular networks and specifically from some SIM cards, there we see access and what what that that traffic is accessing is things that you would imagine elites inside of Iran trying to access.
So a lot of cryptocurrency um exchanges, because if you're trying to get assets out, um, that's one of the ways that you would do it.
Um, a lot of um sort of social media and news trying to see kind of what what is going on in the world that leans in the favor of they did it to themselves and they've basically whitelisted a certain set of elites.
Um the the liens against it is the US is really good and Israel are very good at cyber.
One of the discussions about AI is sort of for hackers, like you want your AI to be better than their AI, because they're using one, and you're it is that a factor in this engagement or not as much yet.
AI is making AI is making everyone more efficient, and that includes hackers, so that the time from when a hacker gains access to a system to how much damage they can do has compressed massively.
So that you know, if in the past it might have taken days from you get access to one system, how do you get access to the whole company?
Now it's taking you know hours or or minutes in order to do that.
There's a uh a tool uh made by a company called Sales Loft called Drift.
It got compromised by some Russian hackers, and it gave the Russian hackers access to the vast majority of Salesforce clients.
It was not nearly as harmful as possible because the hackers didn't understand Salesforce.
And so they were spending several days just trying to mean I don't know, not a lot of people understand Salesforce.
But in um sometimes even people at Salesforce.
People, yeah.
Like, how do we have so many Salesforce administrators?
But and this, this was an attack that happened six months ago.
I think what you would see today is that AI would allow them to get much smarter to get up to speed that much faster.
That much faster and do much more harm.
That's the bad news.
The good news is at the end of the day, who wins in the AI risk is who have whoever has most the most data?
Like it's it we can talk about chips, we can talk about researchers.
Those things will become commodities more and more over time.
The thing that will differentiate is whoever has the most data, and the good guys have more data than the bad guys.
At some level, we would have never described ourselves this way.
But at some level, Cloudflare has always been an AI company where we take, I mean, the reason we have a free service is because all of that is information that we can feed into machine learning algorithms to look for what the new security threats are.
In the same way that we all three and a half years ago, Chat GPT comes out, we're like, whoa, that's amazing.
Internally, we'd have those machine learning uh systems that were finding things that we already knew about and identifying them more quickly.
But about three and a half years ago was the first time where our system started to identify threats that no human had identified before.
And so I think that there's gonna be a bunch of horror stories around AI.
There's gonna be families that send their life savings to some you know, gang members.
Yeah, I mean the AI the AI phishing data is bad.
Yeah.
But like the I think the macro trend is that actually the internet is going to get and and cyber is gonna get a lot better because of AI, even though you're gonna have a whole bunch of headlines that are gonna sound very scary.
Since the last time we talked, you've become much more vocal about AI layoffs.
I will say that I've had other conversations with folks who are sort of like some of the layoffs you see, it's really just businesses like using AI as an excuse.
You you see this as more transformational.
Everybody should just be super honest with themselves which camp they're in.
And there are two camps.
Right now, there is a camp.
It's like if we were in the business, like in on this floor, there are a bunch of screws.
If we were in the business of screwing screws into floors, up until about six months ago, we were doing it by hand.
And we were really good at it.
And we hired some of the best hand screwdrivers in the world.
And then again, there was a there was a there was talk for the last three years that oh, this new technology is coming, and we're gonna have you know automatic electric screwdrivers, and it's everyone's gonna be so much more productive, and we're like, yeah, we tried it, it doesn't sort of work that well.
But somewhere around November, and anyone who's paying attention felt it, the screwdrivers got really good, and the electric screwdrivers became incredibly effective.
And we now have people in one camp that are literally a hundred times more productive than they were before.
They put down entire floors in a day.
That's one camp.
We have another camp who's like, yes, yes, but I prefer my manual screwdriver.
I'm so used to it.
It's always worked well for me.
And and you told me that if I came here and I use my manual screwdriver, that I would have a job forever.
And I believed it when I said that.
But I can't have a world where one employee is a hundred times as productive as the other.
People are like, are you losing sleep over Iran?
I'm like, yeah, I probably should be, but I'm not.
Are you losing sleep over, you know, other things?
What I'm losing sleep over right now is that we have a bunch of our team that's using electric screwdrivers.
We still have a bunch of our team that thinks that that their job is to use manual screwdrivers, and they're complaining that, oh, the electric screwdrivers make mistakes or they do, you know, do various things.
But they're missing the point.
And my job has to be how do I get those folks that are really good with manual screwdrivers to come along?
And what's scary for them, because it tends to be it's not the super senior people, it's not the super junior people, it's the people in the middle who said, You told me this is the game.
I've been playing this game really, really well.
I've been doing that.
How dare you change the rules on me?
And if you do change the rules and I adopt them, how do I have any advantage over the intern?
Right.
How am I gonna be good with the electric screwdriver?
I don't know.
I don't know.
Everything that I was good at was I was really good with the manual screwdriver.
And that's a super scary thing for people who are sort of in the middle of their career.
And what I am deeply worried about, this isn't cloudflow thing, this is an industry-wide thing, it's not even a tech thing.
Yeah, I was gonna ask you like, is this is this just I mean, I know it applies to software and coding, but if if you're in another business.
Legal, it's a funny thing because everyone expects machines to be perfect.
These are not perfect machines.
These are fallible machines.
But it's effectively like you have a hundred times the number of employees, right?
And they make mistakes, but it's great.
They can check each other and they can take a whole bunch of work that was pretty drudgery, writing comments on code in finance, copying information from one spreadsheet to another, and legal, you know, summarizing a bunch of documents.
I mean, those are all things that humans did.
We don't need that anymore.
That doesn't mean we need fewer humans.
I want, I we Cloudflow will have more employees.
We will continue to grow the number of employees at about the same rate that we have.
But what I'm deeply worried about is how do I get the folks who are just worshipping their manual screwdriver to realize that the world is.
And if I'm if I'm someone who like, you know, I'm using uh uh an electric screwdriver sometimes, but not for everything in my job.
I don't hear that it's totally fine.
There's then there's a time and a place.
Be honest.
If you think that your job is to convince people that electric screwdrivers are bad, you're a dinosaur.
And what I'm deeply afraid of is I think that there's a generation of people who are between the ages of 25 and 40, who there's a real risk they're gonna get completely left behind.
It's also terrifying for society.
Because let's say let's imagine you've got a whole like unemployment rate spikes for people in that age group.
That's the people who are gonna start to become more politically active.
Like the populism we see today could get even worse and even crazier.
And and again, like I I think a huge part of my job is how do I convince people the ship has sailed?
It's we're not debating whether electric screwdrivers are better than the management.
And it's not a question of you're saying I'm in favor of it, of a it just it is, it's the reality.
It's not just us, it's every single company.
And so what we saw out of Oracle, what we saw out of Alassian, what we saw out of Block, everyone is gonna do it.
And it and even the companies that are are are growing like crazy, and they might turn around and hire a whole bunch of new people.
Like we we're hiring a thousand over 1,111 interns.
It's a number that means something to us.
But why?
We're pairing each of the interns with a more senior member of our team, because usually the mentorship goes from senior to junior.
We think it's gonna be completely different this year.
Where we think that our team needs to learn from the people who are sort of the natives at electric screwdrivers in order to understand it.
We had an outage last year, it was really bad.
It was basically because a configuration file went out that was that was malformed.
So, what's the solution to that?
Well, we now have an employee, effectively, that doesn't need to sleep, doesn't need to eat, doesn't take breaks, and whose like information um biases are completely uncorrelated with the rest of our team.
And they can check every single configuration change before it goes out.
Not to not to change it or even, but to flag it, like this, hey, this might be a problem.
And this this employee is is AI, isn't it?
Is an agent, right?
And again, no, no, we're not gonna hire someone to do that.
You couldn't, and they would inherently have biases and all kinds of things.
It's the perfect use case for this.
And everyone's gonna implement it.
And by the way, the internet, the cloud, all these things are gonna become massively more reliable because we can have something that just checks everything.
And there was a 14-day debate internally about whether or not we should do this.
What the f like, of course we should do that.
Matthew is not one to mince his words, which I love from the Iran cyber war to electric screwdrivers.
He doesn't hold back.
So how much does he trust the big AI companies?
And how much control do the rest of us have in shaping our tech future?
We'll talk about that more after the break.
Stay with us.
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Hi, I'm PJ Vote.
My podcast search engine has a new two-part series for you.
Of all the new technologies coming out of AI, the most transformative one might be driverless cars.
They're already on the road in 10 American cities, and they're quickly coming to more.
We tell the story of how we got here.
The secret team at Google that spent 15 years building what might be the safest vehicle on the road.
And we cover the fights break, Cloudflare's Matthew Prince talked about cities, where unions and politicians are working to keep those cars off the streets.
Listen to Search Engine wherever you get your podcasts.
Now we talk about whether the big AI companies are motivated to operate in the larger public interest, and how changes in the internet create both challenges and opportunities for industries from media to small business.
Let's jump back in.
You know, bots from from crawling content sites if they didn't want it.
In that conversation, you said you sort of believe that the AI companies were trying to do the right thing.
Has that perspective moved at all?
I mean, we've seen a lot of differentiation lately between anthropic and open AI and how they're dealing with the government.
Do you do you feel like there anything is moved in that?
I think I'm more convinced that that's that that's the case.
80% of the AI companies use us.
And so we know them really well.
We talk all the big ones use us.
And they're they're not stupid.
And they understand that they are part of an ecosystem and they have to behave inside that ecosystem.
And they're gonna act rationally.
And so in the case of media, like if if you were just giving media away for free, of course they're gonna take it.
It's not the right answer for everyone.
Like for Cloudflare, we don't want to block AI crawlers from like crawling our knowledge base.
We want the AI systems to be able to know how to use Cloudflare.
So we we don't block them, we welcome them.
But if your business is selling ads or selling subscriptions, you might say, hey, unless you compensate me, you don't get my stuff.
And that's and that's rational.
And so we're just like providing the tools to do that.
What we have seen, having now done that, is that the deals that people are getting, whether it's Dot Dash meredith or Conde Nast or other other big media companies have gone significantly better.
Now, there's still a lot that's there.
And the and the real challenge is um is it's it's sort of like a superhero movie, like where the hero of the last movie becomes the villain of the next.
Like Google is the hero of the last 30 years of the internet.
They financed the entire thing.
They built a search engine, and then they needed to create content in order to make the search engine valuable.
So they built the monetization engine that that power the entire internet.
And the business model of the internet was generate content, drive traffic, and then sell things, subscriptions or ads.
That's been the business model of the internet.
The problem is that AI breaks that, it doesn't work that way.
And so, like at some level, there has to be a value exchange.
It could be monetary, but it could just be ego.
A lot of times you create something, you put Google Analytics on it just because you're you're just like, wow, look how many people are reading it.
But that's gone way, way, way down because they're not reading it directly.
They're reading the reading the summary, the AI summary Cliff Notes version of it.
And so either.
Which we've all become addicted to.
If you're all yeah, and so it's it has gone in 18 months ago, it was 20 times harder to get traffic from Google than it was 10 years ago.
Now it's now in 18 months, now it's 50 times harder.
And that's the good news.
It's it's 3,500 times harder to get traffic from Open AI than the Google of old.
It's 65,000 times harder to get traffic from Anthropic than the Google of old.
That's changing.
And so the the value exchange needs to change.
Now I think it's going to get fixed.
But who's the problem today?
The problem is Google.
Because Google believes that they have a God-given right to be able to take all of your content and then they would send you back traffic.
But they've stopped sending you back traffic.
Why did Sam and Elon start Open AI?
Because they were terrified that Google was gonna run away with the whole game.
And so everything is started effectively as a counterweight to Google.
And so when you go to OpenAI, when you go to Anthropic and you say you should pay for content, they're like, we will as soon as Google does.
And that's the puzzle.
That's the trick.
If I'm Sundar and I'm running Google, like the smartest thing they could do is actually go and make a market because they have the most money, right?
They're at a profit.
It's a cost that has never been part of their business model.
Totally, right?
But in the future, AI companies are gonna look more like Netflix than some university research lab.
The thing that's gonna differentiate them, and you all intuitively know this.
Like we see how the underlying model is a commodity.
So what differentiates commodity, at the end of the day, it's gonna be who has access to unique data.
So if I'm Sundar, my strategy is to go out and say, I'm gonna do semi-exclusive.
You can't do exclusive because there'll be antitrust problems, but semi-exclusive deals with all of the most important content in the world.
And that will lock them into being the winner uh going forward.
What they're doing now is they just have unique access.
How much more of the internet does Google see than Microsoft Bing?
For every one page that Bing sees, Google sees five.
And when you look at those four pages that Bing isn't seeing, there's some of the most valuable content, especially for AI.
It's things like health data, academic data, a lot of specific local information.
Those are the things that are the most valuable for AI.
OpenAI knows how important this is.
So they are the second best, but they for every 3.5 pages Google sees, OpenAI only sees one.
So there Google has this massive advantage.
And when people were saying, like, how did Gemini catch up?
And we can we can debate whether it's better or worse, whatever.
But but it's back to your point about data.
It's about data and about data.
And I think what the problem is, if we don't, if we either don't find a way to bring Google down and say that you in the new world you have to compete on the same level as everyone else, or bring everybody else up, which actually is kind of interesting, because I actually think that the AI companies, what they would pay to support journalists, is actually not anything close to what they would pay to catch Google.
And so maybe the answer to this, maybe the first move is to say, hey, OpenAI, you wanna see those, you know, three pages that Google sees every time you only see one.
Here's what it costs.
And by the way, we're gonna distribute that out to the content company.
But you have to create a marketplace for that to be able to happen.
Yeah, but then if you game theory that out, what happens?
Well, all of a sudden, when content providers are like, wait, so why are we giving this all for free to Google?
Then Google starts to get restricted, and maybe we actually get to a place.
I am super optimistic in the media space that we might be on the golden age of content creation, and that what will get rewarded in the future is actually much better.
Like the business model of you know, generate content, drive traffic, sell ads.
I would argue maybe has led to a lot of the problems the world has today.
Because, like, what generates traffic?
It's whatever's sharpest, spicy, whoever whoever generates the biggest cortisol response generates the most traffic.
AI doesn't care about that.
Because if you because all AI cares about is the facts.
They want all the facts.
And so there's amazing things that journalists have that are incredible resources that the AI companies would pay a fortune for.
Like imagine you don't just get the article, but you get all the journalists' notes that were behind it.
Right now, and there are there are things you have to do around protecting sources and that stuff.
But you can imagine a world in which you do that.
That all of a sudden is this treasure trove that really does start to advance towards a media future.
What the AI companies wanna pay for, they have a mathematical model of human knowledge.
They also then know what the gaps are in human knowledge.
They wanna fill the gaps.
Turns out I wanna read the stories about people filling the gaps.
The thing, I don't want to read yet another story about what crazy thing happened in Washington, DC yesterday, right?
I want to read the wow, I didn't know that.
That kind of amazing thing.
That's what we all light up for.
And that's the thing that's gonna get rewarded.
My wife and I bought a small local newspaper in our hometown.
It's in Park City, Utah.
We bought it because it was dying, and we think local news is important.
What we did not appreciate was it actually might be that local news is the thing that is the most valuable going forward.
We might make more this year off licensing our stories to AI companies than we do off digital media, digital advertising.
Why?
Because Park City, Utah is a place, some of you go on vacation.
When you go on vacation, you might want to ask your AI what's the hot new restaurant in Park City, Utah.
And if you don't have the park record, then you don't know the answer.
So it's more valuable information, but to a smaller group of people.
Maybe to a smaller group of people, but it doesn't matter because it's it's value.
It's valuable.
And so I think that it's it's those things.
Like I would love it if the New York Times started reviewing hotel rooms.
Is it better to stay in room 1427 or 1429 in the Marriott Marquee?
And that would actually be super valuable information.
Those sorts of little hyper local things are way more interesting than just telling the same story with a slightly different band.
The thing that's just terribly unfair to the New York Times that I keep saying.
If you don't license the New York Times as an AI company, just license the Wall Street Journal and then have your AI rewrite it as if it's a New York liberal and you got the New York Times, right?
Unfair, but there's some version of that.
And it's the reason why Reddit, the public numbers, Reddit got seven times for the same corporate same same number of tokens, seven times the amount that the New York Times did.
Why?
Because if you don't have Reddit, you don't have Reddit.
There's no substitute.
Whereas there's lots of substitutes for that.
I think the media of the future is how do I create information and knowledge that there isn't a substitute for?
So I I want to ask you a little bit about like the value of brand for you.
For you, how important is the brand of Cloudflare?
I mean, I mean, you've been, you know, talked about the most important internet company that you never heard of, right?
It's like backhanded compliment.
But like for you, how do you think about what the brand outages from time to time just so that people appreciate how much it's funny?
We like it outage, our stock goes up.
It's like that's very weird.
But but seriously, though, how do you think about what the brand of Cloudflare should be?
And how important is that in like the value that you have in the future?
So, first of all, let's talk about what brands are.
Brands are just shortcuts for humans to understand value and quality, right?
You buy Nike shoes and you expect you have an expectation of what the value and quality is.
Like, if I say, what's it like to walk into a Walmart?
We all know exactly what that experience is like.
Because we've all had it, and the brand stands for that.
Um, what's interesting is I'm not sure any of those things matter in a world of agenda commerce.
Like what a brand is is gonna be radically different.
And someone has to invent it.
Because if we don't invent what that is, then the agents are all gonna be this massive force of consolidation.
If you because all they're gonna do is go to whatever, they don't care about the brand.
They don't they what they're they're gonna go to whatever they think are they're gonna be able to get whatever you want done the most in the most efficient way that will tend towards bigger consolidated place.
And so I like I am actually optimistic about media.
I am terrified for small business.
Why do you shop at the small business you shop at it is typically because it's either physically convenient for you or because you have some emotional connection to them your agent doesn't give a shit about either of those things I think the most interesting question in the next five years is what's the future business model of the internet I think that a sub question of that is what is a brand in a world of agente commerce let's imagine that you could aggregate here are all the the things that people bought here's how many of them will return here's the customer service response rate you know packaged up into some cryptographically verifiable thing where an agent can come in and say hey I've never heard of this brand before but I can see the customers are super happy shopping from it and then it rewards that if we don't have that again I worry that this that what we're headed towards is a world where we're actually going to crush small businesses we're trying to work with like the visas and PayPal's and Shopify's and and and everyone else in order to say how do we get all the signal back in order to be able to to identify that for Cloudflare I mean I don't know we don't I we the the like we don't think about our we're we're terrible like you can never see we don't put billboards up.
We don't we're we're terrible at at uh at all of those those things.
Um we're throwing a party tonight and then no one even invited me.
So that's how bad we are at right now.
What I tend to think about more is that we're fundamentally in the business of trust.
And like what we ask people to do is kind of crazy.
It's like route all of your traffic through us and trust us, we'll you know we'll handle it well.
Um but uh so we have to just be very much aligned on how do we make sure that we live up to our mission, and our mission is to help build a better internet.
There are so many times like someone will come in and say, if you just did X, we'll give you a hundred million dollars.
Like, like, why didn't we ever get in the advertising business?
Could have been huge.
Like just sync cookies.
We could assembled it.
But at the end of the day, it doesn't make better.
It doesn't help build a better internet.
We're just about out of time, Matthew.
But but we've talked about a lot of uh a lot of things that that maybe make people a little nervous about the future.
Um, that's what I think.
You are optimistic.
So what is the opportunity that people aren't seeing?
What what makes you optimistic?
You you as an individual on your own can build something that will completely change the world and and generate generational wealth for you.
The ability for a small team to do just absolutely heroic things, it's never been possible before.
There is a world in which you know we only have one or two AI companies where journalists, academics, researchers get crushed or go work for one of those big AI companies, which is sort of the black mirror version of it.
But there's another version where we create a world where anyone can start an AI company, where we make the resources as easy as possible, where everyone can start to create content, and the what wins isn't who pisses people off the most, but who wins is who furthers human knowledge.
Like if I were the AI companies, I'd be starting the Academy Awards of content.
Like they should give a award every single year for who advances knowledge the most, and they can measure it mathematically in different fields, right?
And and just celebrate that.
We can create a world where we actually then make it so that if you are a great entrepreneur and you build a better mousetrap, that everyone can find you and you can be successful, and that you don't get crushed because somebody's got a bigger marketing budget than you are, because you can actually demonstrate truthfully, not by some advertising shortcut, but truthfully that your product is better.
That's the world we should be building towards.
And I don't know how to do it, but I think just articulating that we want lots of AI companies, we want lots of content creators, we want lots of businesses, large and small, competing in a fair market, and that's what we should be playing for and asking ourselves what we are doing technologically, what we're doing from a policy perspective, what we're doing from a regulatory perspective.
What we're doing as consumers is are we moving towards that future or away from that future?
In the next five years where we're going to figure out what the future business model of the internet is, and all of you have the opportunity to create that.
Imagine how amazing that is.
It's going to completely change.
And you don't ever see systems as big and complicated as that have these massive disruptive changes.
And so, again, if you think your job is to argue for manual screwdrivers, you're not gonna have fun over the next 20 years of your life.
It's gonna be hard.
If on the other hand, you're like, listen, I'm gonna be open, I'm gonna be um, you know, uh uh curious, I'm gonna try these things, and I'm gonna say, like, that's the direction of the future, but let's make it as optimistic and positive as possible.
Again, I I am 100% confident that tomorrow's gonna be better than yesterday.
Well, uh, Matthew, thank you so much.
Okay.
I learned something new every time I talk to Matthew about what's going on behind the scenes in the tech world.
I don't always agree with all of his predictions, the future of journalism that he sees doesn't quite fit my ideal, but he's always thought-provoking.
One clear takeaway, echoed by my chats with other CEOs, is the changing nature of the workplace.
Executives believe that electric screwdrivers are taking over, and they're making decisions with that assumption in mind.
Even for those of us who never used a manual screwdriver and who aren't even trying to screw in screws, the expectations are shifting.
Will that be good or bad?
As Matthew acknowledges, that in part depends on how we respond.
One thing seems pretty certain to me though, it's gonna be a bumpy ride for everyone.
I'm Bob Sapphian.
Thanks for listening.
Rapid response is Mashumaku Tonina.
Mixing and mastering by Aaron Bob Safian.
Our executive producer is by Ryan Holliday.
Our head of podcast is Lital Malad.
For more, visit Rapid ResponseShow.com.