The Ledger, every show

“In fact, some really prominent companies That do some very, very, very shady things where they basically say, absolutely, we follow the rules of the road, but when push comes to serve, if it turns out they're blocked, then all of a sudden they're doing a bunch…”

“And what we have said at cloudflare is that by mid September, we're gonna treat Google the same way on. If you have an, you know, ads, if you're a business that's ad supported, subscription supported, then we're going to restrict Google from being able to acce…”

“We laid off more than 20% of our team and not because the business was struggling, but, and not because they weren't great team members. But we just need fewer middle managers.”

“I do think in the next six to 12 months, almost every company is going to go through some exercise like this where they're going to cut a bunch of their team.”

“And I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, going, going, you know, forward, say five years, that, that bot traffic will be a thousand times human traffic online.”

“In OpenAI's case, it's 750 times harder to get traffic than it was from Google just 10, 10, 10 years ago. In the case of something like Anthropic, it's 30,000 times more, more difficult to get that traffic.”

“I think they're dead at 250 or 1500 to one that we're seeing with OpenAI and completely dead at 60,000 to one that we're seeing with something like Anthropic.”

“In May of 2026, you won't believe it, but we now see that automated traffic is past human traffic for the first time in the history of the internet.”

“And the app store in some ways was an enormous threat to the web. Like it took people away from the web. It was probably one of the biggest, between it and Facebook were like the two biggest forces that really made the web less interesting.”

“I don't know if they'll pay up before the deadline, but I think it's inevitable that they'll pay up. Because again, I think that they need the content and they understand fundamentally that journalists and content creators and academics deserve to eat.”

“A golf course uses more water than probably all the data centers in the United States over, over the course of a year.”

“La Liga in, in in, in Spain and the league in Italy have decided that instead of partnering with us to take this down, they would sue us instead.”

“And then just today on July first, we announced that we are hard blocking the AI crawlers unless they will actually compensate Content creators for the content that they're creating.”

“In the case of someone like OpenAI, it's 750 times harder than it was with the Google of old. With the case of Anthropic, it's 30,000 times harder than the content of old”

“So, you know, watch our blog, and I have a feeling that some prominent AI companies that are misbehaving are Can get called out pretty soon.”

“I'm actually quite skeptical of the, if we allow open source models, the world is going to end arguments. That seems histrionic to me. There are things we should worry about. Like it is, you know, I think some of the you know synthetic pathogens and other thin…”

“When we talk with the folks at Nvidia, it feels a little bit like talking to Intel back You know, in our case in 2010, or Apple's case in 2005, where they were like, you're doing it wrong if you care about power efficiency.”

“It's, it is, I mean, when we were starting, and by the way, it's why it's the best place to start companies, but it's a terrible place to scale companies.”

“So, so the eBay example, you're like eBay started with Beanie Babies. So I've talked to the founders of eBay about that. That's complete and utter PR retrospective BS.”

“Where it runs a risk is if you start, start to say, you know, we've got to do X. First of all, you'll attract people that think X is, even though you say the journey is much longer that they'll think that that's the end state. And then secondly, it might be th…”

“It is very hard to find an actual startup founder that, that started out saying, we're going to do this small niche thing, and then it grew into this, is this big task. Almost everyone early on, you know, it's why founders, you know, can come across as so, so …”

“I think it's an open question whether, you know, they've been more successful or we've been more successful. Like, they have no costs. They've got this thing that's just a machine that just kicks off a ton of cash, and he can go and focus on, you know, other t…”

“And for a long time, I looked at like, you know, Jeff Bezos. I was like, wow, he seems like he has a pretty good life. He's not a pretty happy person. And out today, it seems like he's optimizing his life for Instagram, which is weird.”

“So I think that they, I think that there's, unfortunately, there's a lot of founders who, after they leave their companies end up either miserable or dead.”

“I think it's very rare to find someone who said, I started out just trying to build, you know, the platform for, you know, People to sell snowboards, and I, and, you know, and I ended up building, building Shopify, or I started out, you know, building that sma…”

“Public market investors are great because if they'll tell you the truth, because, you know, if they don't like what you're doing, they sell your stock.”

“And if we just assume the current trends, what's, what's blows my mind is that if you just fast forward five years from now we estimate now that automated traffic online will be a thousand times what human traffic is.”

“I do think that we're going to move more and more away from kind of an app store model. Because that's not going to be the interface where we reconnect with it.”

“Over the next five years, figuring out what the business model of the next 30 years of the internet, like, that's the most interesting and important question in technology today, by far.”

“If every one of those agents ran in a traditional container, like, you know, which is not even a VM, not even its own server, but just a container, right? You would need more than 40 times the current CPU production in an, in a calendar year in order to suppor…”

“We think that somewhere between one and 10% of those will day one be monetizable through agents with a with a micropayments transaction, which means that if you're going to build something like this, you've got to build a payments infrastructure that can day o…”

“I really think that 2026 is going to be the year that in the media space, in the content space, that you're going to see a real shift and then content creators are going to get paid.”

“The agents have infinite time to research every possible detail. And so they're going to look for where the richest sources of information that are online, which are going to be for the established big companies that are out there.”

“And then by the way, we get to worry about the next problem, which is that AI is this massive divider between, you know, the rich and the poor. And if we're not in an ad based business model in anymore, which I think is likely if you're spending thousands of d…”

“I think that if you extrapolate this out, you know, in five years, I think you'll see a thousand times more bot traffic than human traffic. And if I had to take kind of an over under bet on that, I'd take the over bet that it's just going to, it's growing at s…”

“There will never be a 14th root server, and the organizations that run them will probably never change as well”

“And the same guy to this day is running all of Iranian cyber attacks.”

“If you're asking that question, it probably means you have the wrong co-founders.”

“You know, I think for the next you know, a 104 days, a 104 weeks. So two years you're going to see a log for J like vulnerability every single week.”

“I really do worry that we're going to have this sort of lost generation of sort of either, you know, young millennials or older Gen Z folks that just, they, they're, they were sort of, they're going to have incentives to say we shouldn't use these tools becaus…”

“If I have a developer and I can now give them AI tools and they're 10 times as productive, I'm gonna hire as many developers as I can. If I, you know, have a salesperson and I can give them tools that eliminate the parts of their job that they don't like, whic…”

“Meta is trying to get to 50 to one.”

“I think 12 to one is right. And the benefit of expanding the number of the average number of direct reports Is it inherently flattens the organization?”

“My wife and I bought the local newspaper in our hometown, Park City, Utah. I think we will make more this year off AI licensing deals than we do off display ads.”

“Bandwidth for us is effectively free.”

“And because of where we deploy systems, we often are in places where We don't have to pay for the space or the power, which allows us to then pass those savings on to customers. So it can be significantly more cost effective to use inference with us than it …”

“It's really hard to fire your VCs. It's hard for your VCs to fire you. And so as a result, like actually it's kind of dysfunctional. Whereas public market, like I love our investors because if I do something stupid, they call me up and they say, that was stupi…”

“Like you have a lot of control over how much the pop is going to be. And we sat with bankers and we were like, listen, we want it to go up about. And they were like, okay, if you wanted to go up to 20%, you price it right here. So we priced it right at that po…”