Transcript

The internet is breaking. So what’s next? with Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince

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0:53 Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale summit. This may be our biggest stage yet. Reed Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Masad, and more. Will be there with us October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. If you're building something great, or you want to build something great, We want you there with us too.

1:20 Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. Google is the hero. of the last thirty years of the internet. They finance the entire thing. The problem is that AI breaks that. 18 months ago, it was twenty times harder to get traffic from Google than it was 10 years ago.

1:45 Now it's fifty times harder. It's thirty five hundred times harder to get traffic from OpenAI than the Google of old. Sixty-five thousand times harder to get traffic from Anthropic. Why did Sam and Elon start OpenAI? 'Cause 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.

2:16 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 let's get to it. I'm Bob Safian and this is Rapid Response. So please join me.

3:01 In uh welcoming Uh Matthew Prince, CEO and uh co-founder of CloudFlick. Yes. These look very official. Very official.

3:15 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 the number of new websites has grown. Dramatically. Uh after plateauing for a really long time, actually declining for a little bit, we're now seeing the fastest

3:35 creation of new websites that has happened in in the entire history of the web. We have uh the number of the amount of bot traffic has gone from about twenty percent of all traffic to trending to fifty percent by twenty twenty seven. And growing we think it'll be it'll be over half of internet traffic is 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.

4:10 Amazon is literally suing companies and it was just successful in a in a motion against um Uh perplexity saying you are not, if you're an agent, allowed to shop on Amazon.com. 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 going to look like. We now have a uh conflict in the Middle East. Yeah, and I'm I wanted that. 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 ha hackers, Russian hackers, and North Koreans. Now, what what is the status of that now?

4:56 With uh Yeah but so it was it was it was interesting. But Uh on February twenty seventh. Uh

5:08 The attacks coming out of Iran, so uh from Iran targeting the West. uh increase seven X off baseline. So there's there's always sort of background. And then on February twenty seventh. Massive spike. Why?

5:24 Uh we're not sure. Like did they get advanced warning that on the twenty eighth you was gonna start bombing? Was it just coincidence? We're not sure, but we did see that massive spike. Usually conflict so we saw Russia Ukraine we saw Israel Hamas Cyber

5:41 Proceeds. And then stays elevated through the entire time of when there's a a physical war going on. And then often lasts slightly after whenever sort of peace is declared. Uh in this case it was different. Uh so we saw a massive spike on the twenty seventh, and on the twenty eighth, it dropped down to less than ten percent of baseline. So you less than ten percent of what it had been before.

6:08 We think that what had happened was that the US Ізраїлі стрик 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. Yeah, that's coming back. We've seen a dramatic uptick in Iranian attacks. Um Stryker when a big big Michigan based corporation um got got completely compromised, looks like by 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

6:46 Nation states. That don't necessarily want to get Good. 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 twenty twenty two.

7:05 Um that we would have seen a massive uptick in the number of of Russian cyberattacks that happened. That has not largely happened nearly as much. There have been some, but it's not to the wave that we thought. But they but th 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 US they would be they would do we would come back at them and would shut down their entire power um industrial base, a lot a lot of different different things. So there's sort of a Mutually assured destruction uh concept of cyber r Russian's really ticked up. uh when Israel Hamas uh Uh took off.

7:44 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 we'll be trying again to look like a role. And the the efforts to sort of um degrade uh Iran's capabilities, that doesn't necessarily extend to cyber in the same way it does to other things. 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 or Israel?

8:26 Um because y 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 s 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.

8:52 that um that they did it themselves. They say d 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 elite.

9:09 inside of Iran trying to access so a lot of cryptocurrency um exchanges. If you're trying to get assets out of the city, you're not going Um that's one of the ways that you would do it. Um a 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 leans against it is the US is really good and the 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 i is that a factor in this engagement or not? Not as much yet.

9:49 And it's 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 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 hours or minutes in order to do that. There's a uh a tool uh made by a company called SalesLoft called Drift. It got compromised by some Russian hackers and it gave the Russian hackers access to the vast majority of Salesforce clients. The hackers didn't understand Salesforce, and so they were spending several days just trying to mean I don't know, then not not a lot of people understand Salesforce.

10:33 Yeah, sometimes even people at Salesforce. Like how do we have so many Salesforce administrators. But And this this was a attack that happened six months ago. I think what you see today is that AI would allow them to get much smarter. To get up to speed that much faster and do that much more harm. That's the bad news. The good news is At the end of the day, who wins in the AI race is who have whoever has most the most data.

10:58 It uh we we can talk about ships, 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, ChatGPT comes out and we're like, whoa, that's amazing. Internally, we'd had 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 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.

11:52 Data is bad. Yeah. But Like I think the macro trends. is that actually the Internet is going to get and and cyber is going to get a lot better because of AI.

12:04 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. Y 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.

12:31 It's like If we were in the bit 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.

12:44 And we were really good at it. And we hired some of the Best. Hand screwdrivers. In the world. Uh and then

12:53 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.

13:15 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. W used to have taken us a month. That's one camp.

13:31 We have another camp who's like Yes, yes. I prefer my manual screwdry. I'm so used to it. It it's always worked well for me. And and you told me That if I came here

13:45 And I use my manual screwdriver. That I would have a job forever. And I believed it when I said that. I can't have a world. Where one employee is a hundred times as productive as the other

13:58 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 am losing sleep over right now is that we have A bunch of our team. It's using electric screwdrivers. We still have a bunch of our team. that thin that that their job is to use manual screwdrivers and they are complaining that oh the electrical screwdrivers make mistakes or they do you know various things.

14:19 But they're missing the point. And my job has to be how do I get those folks. They're really good with manual screwdrivers to come along, and what's scary for them 'Cause 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.

14:35 Who said it? 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 internet?

14:48 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.

15:25 And they make mistakes, but it's great they can check each other and they 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 Clever 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 worshiping their manual screwdriver And and if I'm if I'm someone who like

15:59 You know. I'm using a uh electric screwdriver sometimes. But not for everything in my job. I don't hear that it's so there' 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.

16:15 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 about twenty five and forty Who there's a real risk they're gonna get completely left behind. It's also terrifying for society. For people in that age group, that's the people who are gonna start to be become more politically active. Like the the populism we've seen today could get even worse and even crazier.

16:39 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 many. And and it's not a question of you're saying I'm in favor of it of a it's just it is. It's the reality. It's not just us. Every single company. And so what we saw out of Oracle, what we saw out of Alaskan, what we saw out of Block. Everyone is gonna do it.

17:02 And and even the companies that are are are grown like crazy and they might Turn around and hire a whole bunch of new people. Like we we're hiring a thous over one thousand one hundred and eleven interns. It's a number that means something to us. But why? We're pairing each of the interns with a 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. When 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 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 who's

17:45 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 s even. But to flag it, like this, hey, this might be a problem. And this this employee is is a is an AI, is an 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.

18:16 Because we can have something that just checks everything. And there was a Fourteen day debate internally about whether or not we should do this. What the- Like of course we should do that.

18:34 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. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely. From Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search Rapid Response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there.

19:34 Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi. And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more.

19:56 As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future, and we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. For the break, Cloudflare's Matthew Prince talked about cyber war in Iran and how AI impacts have shifted. In just the last few months. 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.

20:40 Let's jump back in. When we talked last time, the the news that we were talking about was a a new tool that Cloudflare had out about sort of helping to block AI 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 Uh we're trying to do the right thing.

21:08 Has that 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 the Anything is moved in that? I think I'm more convinced that that's that that's the case. Eighty percent of the A uh AI companies use us. And so we know them really well. We talk all all the big ones use us. And they're

21:31 They're not stupid and they understand that they are part of an ecosystem and they have to behave inside that ecosystem. And and they're 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.

21:46 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 and be able to know how to use Cloudflare. So we we don't block them, we welcome them. But f 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 gotten significantly better.

22:19 Now There's still a lot that's there, and that will challenge. Is um i it is it's it's sort of like a superhero movie. Like where the the hero of the last movie becomes the villain of the next. Like Google is the hero. 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 powered the entire internet. And the business model of the internet was

22:48 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

23:02 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 you're just like, wow, look how many people were reading it. But that's gone way, way, way down because they're not reading it directly. They're reading the reading the summary. They cliff notes version of it. And so even though it's a very important thing. Yeah, and so it's it it has gone in eighteen months ago, it was twenty times harder to get traffic from Google than it was ten years ago. Now it's now in eighteen months, now it's fifty times harder. And that's the good news. It's it's thirty five hundred times harder to get traffic from open AI than the Google of old. It's sixty five thousand 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?

23:52 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 stop sending you back traffic. Why did Sam and Elon start Open AI? 'Cause they were terrified that Google was gonna run away with the whole game. And so everything is started effectively as a counterweight to Google.

24:13 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 Blue Bowl. Like the smartest thing they could do.

24:26 is actually go and make a market.'Cause they have the most money. Like they're at a property. It's a cost 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.

24:52 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 a unique access. How much more of the internet. Does Google see then Microsoft B? For every one page that Bing S.

25:17 Google sees five. And when you look at those four pages that Book Bing isn't seeing, they're 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 three point five pages Google sees, opening I only sees one. So their gold has this massive advantage. And when people were saying like

25:45 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 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 the D AI companies What they would pay to support journalists. is actually not anything close to what they would pay to catch Google. So maybe the answer to this, maybe the first move is to say, Hey, open AI.

26:18 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. But you have to create a marketplace for that to be able to happen. 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 the the business model of

26:52 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

27:03 Traffic. It's whatever sharpest spicy whoever generates the biggest cortisol response generates the most traffic. AI doesn't care about that. Because if you because all the I 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 economies 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 and that stuff, but you can imagine a world in which you do that.

27:32 That all of a sudden is this treasure trove that really does start to advance towards a media future. What the AI companies want to pay for. They have a mathematical model of human knowledge. They also then know what the gaps are in human knowledge. They want to 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 wanna 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. A small local newspaper in our hometown. It's Park City, Utah. We bought it because it was dying, and we think local news is important. What we do not appreciate.

28:10 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 So it it's more valuable information but to a smaller group of people. Maybe to a smaller group of people, but it's but it doesn't matter because it's it's valuable. 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.

28:49 Is it better to stay in room 1427 or 1429 in the Mariette Marquis? 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 which is 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 if 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 number is right about seven times for the same corporate same same number of tokens.

29:26 Seven times the amount. Than 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 meaning of the future is how do I create information and knowledge that there isn't a substitute for. So so I I wanna ask you a little bit about like the value of brand. For you. How important is the brand of Cloudflare? I mean you've been, you know, talked about

29:51 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 a very important thing. We like out as our stock goes up. It's like But I but seriously though, how do you think about what the brand of Cloudflare should be and how important is that in

30:16 Like the value that you have in in the future. So 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.

30:39 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 and someone has to invent it, because if we don't invent what that is. Then 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. Whatever you want done the mo in the most efficient way that will tend towards Bigger.

31:10 consolidated place. And so I like I'm 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 agent commerce. Let's imagine that you could aggregate here are all the the things that people bought, here's how many of them were returned, here's the customer service response rate.

31:46 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 gonna crush small businesses. We're trying to work with like the Visas and PayPal's and Shopify 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. Like we don't think about our we're we're terrible like you've never seen we don't put billboards up. We don't we're we're terrible at at at all of those those things. Um W we're throwing a party tonight and then no one even invited me. So that's how bad we are at play now.

32:32 Um 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?

32:55 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 why didn't we ever get in the advertising business? Could have been huge. Just sink cookies. We could have sold it. But at the end of the day. It doesn't make a better internet. We're just about out of time, Afton, but but we've talked about a lot of uh a lot of things that Maybe my own. Make people a little nervous about the future. But the future is much better. You are optimistic. So what is the opportunity that people aren't seeing? What what makes you optimistic?

33:30 On your own. Can build. something that will completely change the world and and generate generational wealth for you. A small team

33:41 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

33:53 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 what wins isn't who pisses people off the most, but who wins is who further human knowledge. Like if I were the AI companies, I'd be starting the Academy Awards of content. Like they should give a r award every single year.

34:25 for who advances knowledge the most and they can measure it mathematically in different fields, right? And and and just celebrate that. And we can create a world where We actually then make it so that if you are a great entrepreneur and you build a better mouse trap. 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.

35:13 What we are doing technologically, what we're doing from a policy perspective, what we're doing from a regulatory perspective, what what we're do doing as consumers is it are we moving towards that future or away from that future. The next five years, we're gonna 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. it's you're not gonna have fun over the next twenty 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 agree. I know.

35:51 Uh I mean it trying 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 a hundred percent confident that tomorrow's gonna be better than yesterday. Well Matthew. Thank you so much. 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,

36:45 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 Safian. Thanks for listening.

37:08 Rapid response is a wait what original. I'm Bob Safian. Our executive producer is Eve Tro. Our producer is Alex Morris. Associate producer is Mashimaku Tonina. Mixing and Mastering by Aaron Bastonelli. Our theme music is by Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcasts is Le Tal Malad.

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