Auctions

The Observation Paul Ampe would dictate letters. I didn’t know shorthand. So I’d catch the sense, then put the words back in his mouth. Paraphrase first. Then write like him. That was only the start of the drill. Sometimes I had to research. I’d dig, report back, and he’d dictate again from what we’d learned. Shared thinking. His knowledge and my research mixed into one letter. The page left the building as his voice, for his practice, for the client. Not as a memo that announced I had synthesized something clever in the back room. ...

How I became someone who could teach is not why I still do. The origin story is real. It just isn’t the ignition. I can still see sixth grade like it was this morning. Small town. Upsala, Minnesota. Grade of about thirty kids. I was not very good at math. I can see the room. The desk at the front. Me bending over it. My teacher telling me it’s okay. Some people are just not good at math, she said, and never will be. ...

The Observation I rolled off as Board Chair of the National Auction Association. The gavel moves. The calendar clears a little. Then the letters arrive. I expected thanks. I expected kindness. What I did not fully expect was the mirror. A few people quoted phrases I say without thinking. Most people did not quote me at all. They described the same few things: showing up when the path was muddled, teaching when the easier move was to protect my time, making room for people who were still figuring out whether they belonged, and caring more about getting a hard call right than about winning the room that day. ...

After a foodservice liquidation, the survey scores came in. Same complaint, different names. The display piece mounted high on the wall. The scramble for help. Paying someone to take down what they already bought. Our invoice terms were clean. The buyer removes their lots. Onsite help is fee-based, not staff. High mounts and wall pieces were always going to be the buyer’s problem under the paper. I still kept catching recovery notes that apologized for the terms. “You shouldn’t have had to climb.” “You shouldn’t have had to pay for help.” That sounds kind. It also rewrites the deal after the gavel. ...

The Observation I was listening to Lex Fridman with Julia Shaw on the bystander effect, and the piece that stuck was simple: if you’re not first on the scene, you look at the other faces to figure out what this is. Calm faces mean “not an emergency.” Your calm becomes data for the next person who walks up. Lex’s point was that most people think they’d resist evil, or step up on a street when something bad is happening. Most people don’t. You have to simulate the hard act of resisting, or of intervening, because in the moment it’s not easy. ...

The Observation I spent a long day scoring auctioneers. Prelims first. Then finals: interview, then selling again. Prelims decide who keeps competing. They ask a hard question: can you call bids under pressure, in front of people who do this for a living? That skill is real. It’s not the whole title. The final score is not the prelim run again. You sit and answer for the trade. Then you sell again on the block. Only people who advance face that second test. ...

The observation On July 1, Cloudflare shipped something called the Monetization Gateway. Any site behind their network, which is roughly a fifth of the web, can now charge for anything it serves: pages, datasets, APIs, tools. The mechanics run on HTTP 402, a status code that has sat in the spec unused since the 90s, literally reserved as “Payment Required” for a future that never showed up. An agent requests a resource, gets a 402 with a price, pays in stablecoins, and the content comes back. Sub-second, wallet to wallet, no account signup, no API key. It’s built for machine buyers, and Cloudflare says the quiet part out loud: AI crawlers request content a hundred to tens of thousands of times for every human visitor, and you can’t sell a subscription to a crawler. ...

On June 3, 2026, Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, posted a number from his own network’s live data. For the first time in the history of the internet, more than half of all web traffic was not human. Bots, crawlers, and AI agents made up about 57 percent of the requests. People made up the rest. Prince said he’d figured the crossover would come at the end of 2027. Agentic traffic got there a year and a half early. ...

A seller calls a few days after the auction closes. The line of equipment they bought new in 2021 came back at 40 cents on the dollar, and they’re sore. They paid top money for it. They expected more than this. So you do the thing the business trained you to do. You send the marketing report. Look at the reach. Look at the registered bidders, the ad spend, the page views, the email opens. We ran the play. We found the market. ...

Two observations stacked on the same Friday morning. The first one I’ve lived. Marketing agencies typically charge a percentage of marketing spend as their fee. The agency makes more money when the client spends more money. The incentive is to grow the budget, not the results. I’ve been quietly dismantling that arrangement in our vendor stack for the last couple of years. The second one I heard this morning. Pavel Durov on the Lex Fridman Podcast (#482, Sept. 30, 2025), making the point that drug companies aren’t actually incentivized to find the root-cause cure. They’re incentivized for you to keep taking the drug. Recurring revenue. Maintenance, not resolution. ...