Shopify CEO on How AI is a Scapegoat for Mass Layoffs & Trump Derangement Syndrome in Canada

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People who fear of losing and people who fear of winning are clearly going to look at things much more short-term. The world really needs to understand that the people who build companies are fundamentally crazy people. [SPEAKER_00] Now, I've known Toby Lutke for years. [SPEAKER_00] He's the founder and CEO of Shopify, $160 billion public company.

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This podcast is a Toby you've never seen before. He was incredibly honest, very funny, and pretty controversial. Strap in, this is an absolute banger. All the aesthetics around what people believe to be good leadership comes from movies. [SPEAKER_01] I have this job so other people can have the jobs I wish I could have. [SPEAKER_01] None of the people who are doing jobs that are just tasks have good jobs.

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The more wealth and resources an entity or even an individual has, the more deserving of scrutiny they are. What really sucks in the world is that we are prioritizing things that sound good over things that work. Giving money is not virtuous unless it causes the right things. I think great leaders must be exothermic and must be a heat source for the company. Many of our best engineers have not written code this year. December changed everything. Opus changed everything. [SPEAKER_00] Does that excite you? [SPEAKER_00] Ready to go? [SPEAKER_00] Toby, I always enjoy our discussions. [SPEAKER_00] I've been so looking forward to this.

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[SPEAKER_00] I have many, many questions printed out for us today.

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Thank you so much for joining me today, dude. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, I was looking forward to catching up again.

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[SPEAKER_01] I enjoyed our conversation last time. [SPEAKER_01] So let's, yeah. [SPEAKER_01] And also, you know me. [SPEAKER_01] So therefore, that is incredibly ambitious of you to have lots of nodes.

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Let's try to get as much as we can. But yes, chances are the first question is going to nerdsnipe us into some kind of rabbit hole, but then hopefully winds up more interesting than expected. [SPEAKER_00] The first question is not, tell me how you started Shopify. [SPEAKER_00] I mean, Jesus, I love these where they start with, and it's like, have you heard my thousand other shows that I've done? [SPEAKER_00] I do want to start there. [SPEAKER_00] I've found with entrepreneurs that you can basically switch, put them into one of two buckets. [SPEAKER_00] One is motivated by the fear of losing, and another is inspired by that incredible hunger to win.

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[SPEAKER_00] For me in particular, I hate losing more than anything, and that's what drives me.

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What would it be for you, the fear of losing? [SPEAKER_01] My own answer to your question here is unsatisfactory to myself, partly because I'm in the middle of trying to figure this out, and if any thoughts would be helpful there. [SPEAKER_01] But I do feel like there's a marked difference with this, because people who fear of losing and people who fear of winning are clearly going to look at things much more short-term. [SPEAKER_01] It's the next iteration that matters the most. [SPEAKER_01] And I think that's a limiting thing in a lot of cases, especially with partnerships, especially in business, especially with working together, careers, and so on.

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[SPEAKER_01] It just makes everything change when you're taking a longer perspective. [SPEAKER_01] It starts with sitting down with people and helping them become the best version of themselves, puzzling out something for them, or giving them the hardest possible tasks that they could possibly manage in order for them to grow.

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All these things will have significantly more compound advantage if you take a longer perspective because more of the benefits of these actions will accrue to whatever you're building. And so I think it just changes the base framing you take to almost every challenge you encounter. And it's funny because I think this is what my colleagues and friends here tell me: once you understand that being the source of energy that I'm tapping into building actually makes the rest of Shopify start clicking a little bit more in place. It's a clarifying thing because most people I've worked with for a while can sort of ask themselves, how would Toby think about this?

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And they say that doing this actually makes things click in place and makes the next meeting with me a lot more predictable. So I'll say I think there's more orientations. It's just that many of those don't lend themselves to becoming executives in companies. So I think this is partly why there's a winnowing effect that happens as people go through careers that discards people that come from different motivational backgrounds. [SPEAKER_00] Is that winnowing effect changing in a world of AI with different skills and different mindsets maybe required to progress than were required before? I think it's actually been changing in a very recognizable way.

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Okay, so there's a thing called Enneagram, which is reasonably commonly used and quite good. Unfortunately, I think it's sort of convoked and changed its terms, so you would have to find one low background Enneagram test from 2019 to get the real thing. But if you do it, it sort of separates people by different propensities. So this particular test, if I look through the executives I've worked with over the last 20 years, you end up with mostly achievers. Basically, the people who have never seen a ladder not worth climbing. And there's some few fives who are the people who go really, really deep. That's often a CFO.

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And in most companies, especially professionally managed companies, there's nothing else in the exact difference. And I'm an eight, which I almost already said by talking about my motivational source being that dissatisfaction or the sort of initiatification of everything, which I want to fix at least in my little nook of the world. And so I don't think eights are deserving. Eights are basically conspired against in companies because they are paying their asses. They just say a thing. They say, this is shit. If something, if our shit does not smell better than other people's shit, therefore, this is exactly what it looks like.

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And we don't, any amount of fancy dressing doesn't change what it is. They are dangerous to everyone else's careers around them.

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Which I want to fix at least in my little nook of a word. And so I don't think aides are conspired against in companies. Because they are paying their asses. They just say a thing. They say this is shit. If something, if our shit does not smell better than other people's shit, therefore, this is just exactly what it looks like. And we don't, any amount of fancy dressing doesn't change what it is. They are dangerous to everyone else's careers around them. They usually don't get the promotion, so they usually leave. But what can happen is they start companies because they do see, often see things. And so the effect and experiment, I think, that's been run ever since, I think, Apple brought Steve back. It just created the boundary conditions for more financiers, capital boards to actually just give founders a longer run, right? A longer run rate. And so the results were pretty good because now you have diversity of executives. You have someone who no one can get rid of who just calls shit, shit. And that just turns out to be really good for companies. And so Shopify is remarkably high on aides because I really seek them. I fundamentally like this kind of discussion. And so that's just like I propose nothing. And so I think this experiment is being run and I think can be made to be an active thing that people, I think this can be quite actionable.

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[SPEAKER_00] One of the most memorable statements I've heard on the show is from one of my best friends, Daniel Dines from UiPath. And he said to me, a lot of people think they want to be me, but it's very lonely, alone in my head. And I was like, oh, I've never felt so seen in my life. And that's why I'm in therapy. When you hear that, how do you feel?

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I think there's no problem with that. I totally like, look, I have lots of nice things. I have a really fun job. I think that's perfectly natural that a lot of people want to be me. They presumably do not want to spend the last 22 years the way I did. So I think that's a very natural thing. I, yeah, look, I'm a glorious mess, right? So it's just like, I really need to understand that the people who build companies are fundamentally crazy people, right? It's an unreasonable thing to do. So a trope of all change and all progress depends on the unreasonable man because the reasonable man does not do things exactly the same way that everyone else is doing. That is a reasonable thing to do in any kind of situation, right? So you gotta expect that. And it's a package. It's high variance people. It's like all the aesthetics around what people believe to be good leadership comes from movies or the very carefully publicly curated tip of icebergs of how it actually worked. If you look at any biography of anything, you realize people are crazy people who caused this. Read about Watson, the founder of IBM. It's just like, you think there's tyrants in business right now? No, no, no. You don't know anything about how these things went back in the day. So absolute fireworks every meeting. And so I have this job.

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So other people can have a job that I wish I could have, but I'm running interference.

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[SPEAKER_01] I didn't want to be CEO. I learned I had to become CEO because you can't run a product driven company without also being in control of a company. If you like the needs of product and companies are extremely divergent, unless you're taking a perspective three years out, at which point they kind of come to the same point and actually augment each other. So basically every single day is like a marshmallow test, right? Are you going to eat the marshmallow now? Or you get two in the future? Yeah. And frankly, which we know from the actual marshmallow tests, people don't usually wait for the two marshmallows. You know, it's just not in human nature. Everyone's discount rate is different, but there's some sense to this. So if you want a great product, you have to take a very longterm position and taking a longterm position doesn't mean just bring up numbers in three years. It means willing to have bad numbers for a while if you think this is going to lead to the right place and that's a hard choice to make. But it's.

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[SPEAKER_00] Do you think you have the luxury to do that today? Being a public company given the expectations that Wall Street puts on you?

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Oh yeah, of course. Yeah, it's big dude. There's nothing better in the world than being a trusted public company. The second best thing is being a trusted private company. It's much worse to be an untrusted public company than an untrusted private company. So it's a stack ranking. Unfortunately people become a trusted private company, but with their investors and have to actually take a step down to being an untrusted public company by going public. This is why people don't go public, they just can't deal with that, which is funny because it's actually required to then get to the best spot in the end. So which is literally the reason why we did it 10 years ago when we were tiny because

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The second best thing is being a trusted private company. It's much worse to be an untrusted public company than an untrusted private company. So it's a stack ranking. It's like, unfortunately people become a trusted private company, but with their investors and have to actually take a step down to being an untrusted public company by going public. This is why people don't go public, they just can't deal with that, which is funny because it's actually required to then get to the best spot in the end.

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So which is literally the reason why we did it 10 years ago when we were tiny because it just felt cool, let's go make the careers of public market investors who bet on us and then they make lots of money and then they become on our side and now they trust us. [SPEAKER_00] Do you think that chasm is harder from trusted to untrusted if you are much larger? [SPEAKER_00] We both know the Colossons, I'm sure that chasm for them seemingly will be much larger given their $150 billion price now. Yeah, I think everything, any approach works if you have a Colosson promise. So I don't think it matters for them. So they can just decide.

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I think they are really bad proxy for what you should be doing because most people aren't. So I think it's a much saner strategy to do the flip to public as a minor financing. This is a thing, 10 years ago, actually 11, to 2015 Shopify's revenue. I want to say, I'm sure people are gonna laugh because I'm getting these numbers wrong, but I don't know, 200 or something million or whatever. I remember, the valuation for first trade, you set the pricing to then figure out who comes in the book right after the road show. It's a high stress meeting later day after spending a week, just you don't even know which city you're in. Just doing a presentation a hundred times.

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And everyone's like, well, Fidelity, they did place this order. You have a book, right? And so you have to figure out, okay, well, what is the price you set? You're literally arbitrary. You as a CEO have to set that price and you get all sorts of advice. Now the advice comes from the investment bankers. And you are not the customer. Your crop, the customers actually the people in the book, right? So their job is to get everyone in the book the cheapest possible deal. But they, that is beautifully obscured in the process of who is the customer of whom? And luckily I studied the way the compensation packages work for the investment bankers before I went on the road.

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So this was all pretty transparent. [SPEAKER_00] I'm sure they were thrilled about that. Yeah. No, I don't think they liked it. But yeah, anyway, I was also very clear about this. I was like, Hey, I understand how you are going to get your bonus. So I will, I like you. I want you to get your bonus, but I'm becoming a public company CEO. So I'm gonna stop my fiduciary duty T minus 10. I'm gonna optimize for a company for you. And then they totally respect that.

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[SPEAKER_01] In fact, the banker who took me public is my CFO right now. [SPEAKER_01] So 10 years later, which is really funny. [SPEAKER_01] High stress meeting, picture 80th floor somewhere in Manhattan, room, the biggest table you've ever seen. [SPEAKER_01] Lots and lots of people, paper everywhere, prospectuses, calls, high tech and iPad. [SPEAKER_01] And with the order book, everyone looks at this thing. [SPEAKER_01] People are making changes.

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And you have to freeze at a certain point, you pick a price and it just like everyone put a limit order in that caps out at 14 for the first trade as far. It was crazy. Everyone in the room, literally absolutely everyone's like, no, you gotta give allocations because those other people will stay in your stock and they're longterm and they don't immediately flip. I was just like, okay, well, whatever. I raised it past the range because we had a lot of pickups. I knew where my growth was gonna come from. I was unafraid and I picked it now, which I thought was a really good one. First trade was $10 high or something. It's like, hell.

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[SPEAKER_00] It's so clearly I was pretty much really happy with my performance at this moment. I should have, the nice, the beautiful thing about markets is they actually are excellent distributed brains and they tell you what it really was. Anyway, the point was we went out at, I believe $1.67 billion valuation. And I think, at various times, not right now, I think, but I don't know. I don't check. It's a hundred times higher now. And as you can imagine, that makes a lot of careers, right? The people on the road who then didn't place an order for a couple of dollars difference past the range for a good company, probably got their promotion at all the places.

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They are the senior partners now. So they love Shopify. [SPEAKER_00] Toby, you're one of the most thoughtful CEOs that I know. [SPEAKER_00] I've interviewed a thousand. [SPEAKER_00] So the catalog is quite wide at this point. It's a hundred times higher now. So as you can imagine, that makes a lot of careers, right? It's the people on the road who then didn't place in order for a couple of dollars difference past the range for a good company, probably got their promotion at all the places. They are the senior partners now. So they love Shopify. [SPEAKER_00] Toby, you're one of the most thoughtful CEOs that I know. [SPEAKER_00] And I've interviewed a thousand.

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[SPEAKER_00] So the catalog is quite wide at this point. [SPEAKER_00] When we think about today, how many people do you have in Shopify around number?

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Just about seven and a half, 8,000 people.

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[SPEAKER_00] Seven and a half, 8,000. How many people will you have in five years time? Do you think? My real hope is seven and a half to 8,000, right? At a hundred X productivity level, right? I do think there's problems of scale. It would be sad to be in a company that is opportunity limited, right? I actually might, I shouldn't say this. Most companies probably are opportunity limited. They're probably not ambitious enough for, and I mean this in a product sense. Again, remember Shopify is a fairly broad mission. We want to make entrepreneurship more common, right? So inside of this ambition, we can do a lot.

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I just think you're going to go into golden age of entrepreneurship. It's by far the most AI safe job. It's by far the most AI benefiting job. Think about that combination here. So everyone who has a plan B of some kind of ambition of, Hey, I'm going to make products is going to be, yeah, well, let's go. So all priors don't matter anymore because you didn't need to come from a family of entrepreneurs and having been at dad's office or your grandma's printing shop in my case, to understand that a business formation is something that real humans can do and that gives employment and these kinds of things. You can actually, first of all, you learn that anyway.

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And then all the various tasks, your handy sidekick AI who acts as your co-founder will just tell you. Right. [SPEAKER_00] So if we're staying flat in the hope for all the layoffs that we see today, is that efficiency gains from AI or is that overhiring in a COVID era?

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[SPEAKER_01] Yeah, it's overhired. [SPEAKER_01] AI will change the mix of jobs. [SPEAKER_01] No doubt.

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What you see right now is not AI layoffs. It was just the companies that are really slow that overhire, just everyone else, doing it now. What you will see is AI is going to be blamed for absolutely everything, right? Because it's the perfect scapegoat. It's the perfect Girardian scapegoat for everything, right? It can't fight back. In fact, you can beautifully find communities, which I think are entirely wrong, but they are around. There's people who are talking very eloquently about the dangers of AI even past jobs. And my industry has been gaslighting everyone into AI fear and sci-fi has done it for sixty years before that too.

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So I don't even know who's supposed to be on AI side. That doesn't mean, but it's just incredible.

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[SPEAKER_01] It's objectively mind-blowingly making my life better in every which way, everything. Do you think you have a utopian lens? When I look at what Claude can do when it comes to social media design, I'm being blunt. A lot of tasks, which are not actually that difficult, but they are execution oriented. I know I've done them, so people can't be upset with me for it.

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[SPEAKER_00] Claude does it very well now. [SPEAKER_00] How do you keep that utopian mind with the recognition that most of these tasks are easily replaceable with agents? Because none of the people who are doing jobs that are just tasks for other people have good jobs. Those are not good jobs. Being an automated task queue is not a great job. Great jobs are things that you have agency and can produce things and make things. [SPEAKER_00] Do you think everyone can have a great job though? Look, lots of people who are right now rich choose not to work. Right?

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[SPEAKER_01] This is a very, very common thing.

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Right? So lots of my friends are telling me, what are you doing Toby? And I'm just, Hey, I'm born bread for working. I'm, don't ask the, don't ask a rain cloud to do the job of the sun. Right? This is my task and this is what I do. And maybe some people aren't, lots of people, what they do on a weekend or what they do in the evening or for some extra dollar, give guitar lessons or so is vastly more productive for society. But then the cashier job at the supermarket, right? Or these kinds of things. So I think people will get options. I think you know, products that get enormously cheap or purchasing power is going to go up crazy. And people will be able to make choices.

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We will find new ways of working together. We will find much more liquid ways of moving money around for value generated.

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more productive for society. But the cashier job at the supermarket, right? Or these kinds of things. So I think people will get options. I think products that get enormously cheap or purchasing power is going to go up crazy. And people will be able to make choices. We will find new ways of working together. We will find much more liquid ways of moving money around for value generated. I know multiple people who have built companies, they sold the companies really well. And they became essentially gentlemen scientists or gentlemen programmers. Most of us who use cloud code use it through Ghosty on a Mac, or usually Ghosty is a terminal application. It's just perfect, right? And it's such a weird thing to have spent your time doing this, but the author chose to, after he sold his company by hand, make a perfectly crafted piece of software that he thought needed to exist. And now everyone agrees with him on how it needed to exist because we built everything on it. I have 15 Ghosty terminals on my desktop all around right now. Which I'm ignoring because we're having a fun conversation here. But if I were on a phone call with some legal necessity, I'd be telling through Ghosty to my coworkers what needs building at Shopify. And so that's what we live in. So I think we are all going to figure out remarkable ways. Think about just how good we are at coming up with new jobs. We are incredible at this.

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[SPEAKER_00] It will never stop being incredible at this. Of the top 10 best paid jobs today, eight did not exist 20 years ago.

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That's a brilliant start. And that is going to be true in 10 years too, and 10 years after that. My favorite example of this is a motorsport guy, Formula One. Formula One is one of the biggest spectacles providing the best jobs. There are 800 people building an engine at Mercedes and at every one of the engine manufacturers. 800 people are building, are living in the perpetual golden age of mechanical engineering. Everything matters. It's all skill. They're getting a scorecard every weekend, how they are doing compared to everyone else. They are basically in an engineering world championship. And that's the same for aerodynamics team and chassis team and so on. And it's a sport named after a rule book. Think about this. Formula One is literally the name. It's not the name of a sport. It's the name of a rule book, which is called Formula One because the sport falls out of a rule book and it's this thick. I have a printed version of it. It's absolutely fascinating. So that's 800 people there. Another 800 people work on the car and then the drivers and all that. We just made this up, right? And all of our lives is richer because it exists, I think. Because...

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[SPEAKER_00] My favorite thing about Formula One is actually the importance of storytelling. If you follow Formula One for 10 years, you'll remember it was Bernie Ecclestone and bluntly an aging sport with middle-aged to older men only liking it with a really decaying audience. Drive to Survive saved the sport in many respects. [SPEAKER_00] 100%.

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Because it brought the best part out, which was accessible to the people who really worked hard on pulling the story. And if you watch Rush, I grew up in Germany, so Niki Lauda was a hero in the Germanic culture, he was everywhere, right? What a story that is. If you haven't listened to this and haven't watched the movie, definitely watch Rush. It's one of the greatest. The sport has had its heroes and its nemeses and its rivalries in such a way, but it couldn't get it out until it got combined with media, essentially Hollywood and Liberty Media. So think about how much growth and therefore how much entertainment and delight just by putting pieces together in a new way, right? It's an aging sport about a rule book plus spectacle ends up being something that's of way more value than you would ever imagine. I just feel we will find a lot of that. The world is very impoverished by how expensive it was to make software at any given time. There's a limiting factor in the world for why things can't grow faster. And growth creates wealth. Growth doesn't create wealth, growth brings wealth from resources essentially into the economies. That's what it does. If you've built a company, you are causing wealth to be created, like to be brought from the hypothetical things that could exist into the actual things. And once things are actual, then people can use money to move wealth around. And this is where our economies grow. I feel this is worth saying because there's an enormous amount, at least half of the population is utterly confused about how this all works and makes very bad

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Growth brings wealth from resources into the economies. That's what it does. If you've built a company, you are causing wealth to be created, to be brought from the hypothetical things that could exist into the actual things. And once things are actual, then people can use money to move wealth around. And this is where our economies grow. I feel like this is worth saying because there's an enormous amount, at least half of the population is utterly confused about how this all works and makes very bad choices due to this.

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Do you worry that the US hates wealth more than ever before? You said about your friends who stopped working. I have many of those friends, but there is a hatred towards wealth that has never been so visible in my eyes as an outsider looking in at the US.

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[SPEAKER_01] I think we are probably at a high watermark for the United States, but it's still sufficiently low that it's fine and easily can get into self-healing. I think, honestly, the more wealth and resources an entity or even an individual has, the more deserving of scrutiny they are. The thing that isn't working right now is that the process of figuring out who's additive and who isn't is completely broken. It's owned by people acting in utterly bad faith. [SPEAKER_00] What do you mean by that, Toby?

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I mean, there's simply no chance that we shouldn't be deeply, deeply, deeply, in fact, daily thankful for what Elon is doing on planet Earth. He's so singular. My car—I did not touch the steering wheel of my car this morning. It just drove me. It also didn't use any gasoline. I don't care particularly about this, but that's just incredible. That's cool to have that option. And it's also an amazing car. I have a Model Y, I love it. And that Model Y that I love is a car that is incredibly affordable compared to the norms of cars. It's better than any Koenigsegg I could potentially buy. I have no interest in those because they're not as good as a car for a longer trip. I also put a Starlink unit into the back, and if someone else drives, I can work from there. That's also Elon. And then usually I open my phone and talk to the planet Earth. Increasingly, if you're an expert, you're going to see this—you're getting a lot of replies from people in Japan. Turns out, like in Hitchhiker's Guide, the Babel fish, how central that is to the story. And it's just cool. You know what the biggest platform for your thoughts, good or bad, on planet Earth is X right now. And where the biggest, one to N at least, biggest follower accounts are. And so there's no barriers anymore. You just talk—someone says something really smart in French or Arabic or any other language. And I see it in my feed. And if you can have a conversation in English back, they see it in their feed, and so on and so on and so on. I could spend the rest of this podcast talking about the incredible gifts that he's made. And of course he's captured some very small amount, some percentage point of all the value that exists all around us. He actualized a tremendous amount and captured some of it for himself, which he uses to do more of it. He's the one-man engine. I'm marveling at this in a way that's like, holy shit, how cool is it that we live on a planet where when you go through the list of the richest people on planet Earth, all of them have built something. And that's incredible. So what I really mean is not about Elon. What I really mean is the misattribution of who we should be angry at. It's okay to have questions about rich people who inherited their wealth and then use it poorly, or came to it by divorce, for instance. If you have not created wealth, you are a custodian of wealth and you need to use it gainfully for society. I think what really sucks in the world is that we are prioritizing things that sound good over things that work. I mean, we're prioritizing real people—everyone knows exactly what's good when you talk to them. It's just that media, especially state-run media and distorting media, the stuff that's been around for a while, is on a beat that's very intentionally trying to obscure what to be upset with.

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[SPEAKER_00] Well, if we just combine those two together, media is distorting what to be angry about. I remember when Jeff Bezos's wife gave some extremely large amount of money. I can't remember what it is. And they kind of then chastised her for giving it away inefficiently or to the wrong organizations or to the wrong people. And I was like, my God. But that's a good part. So this is what I want more of. So maybe we are on different sides on this, but giving away money, ideally through a transaction. And so, [SPEAKER_00] Well, if we just combine those two together, media is distorting what to be angry about.

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[SPEAKER_00] I remember when Jeff Bezos's wife gave some extremely large amount of money. [SPEAKER_00] I can't remember what it is. [SPEAKER_00] So, and they kind of then chastised her for giving it away inefficiently or to the wrong organizations or to the wrong people. And I was like, my God, [SPEAKER_00] But that's a good part. So this is what I want more of. So, so maybe we are on different sides on this, but I, again, giving something money, ideally through a transaction,

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like any, so someone starts a Shopify store, sells a new thing, ethically sourced leather jackets, whatever. When you purchase this, presumably it's going to be slightly more expensive than leather. But what you do is you make a vote for it. You make a vote that you think this is a product that should exist and you vote for free money, right? Like, and what will happen afterwards? It's like that creates resources for a company.

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And that means it's a viable product. They can employ people. It's a vote for everything that made this. It's also a vote for the supply chain that it was created. Like the ethically sourced leather now has a customer that's viable, an additional one. Therefore, the numbers go up, therefore the factories can ramp production and eventually it's going to come down in price and therefore it might even be, in fact, the synthetic leather, there's the potential to make it a cheaper event. Then the alternative that some people have, there are a lot of issues with. The point is every dollar everyone spends is a vote. Real democracy actually happens by capital allocation that's distributed. This is also why we need markets and why capitalism works because capitalism causes markets. Capitalism doesn't work intrinsically. It's just the thing that causes the most intelligence to be imbued into the markets because it's the least distorted. When money is used, you should figure out what the second and third order effects are of this. And I think, look, if you're very internet, this is hot off the presses, but it's pissing me off to such an unbelievable degree that I just can't stop thinking about it. Maybe a really deserving example of this is I went to a conference once, I stayed for the weekend because at the same hotel, there was another tech conference, which was a conference called, well, it doesn't really matter, but it was for object oriented programming conference. And basically the first talk was like, guys, I think we won. So not quite sure what we're supposed to talk about because everyone's writing code object oriented right now. And then it was hilarious. I love the honesty. This is the kind of honesty you can only find amongst nerds. I think they actually, I don't know if it ended up being held again, but everyone was just doing a victory lap over the cause. And so, in real world, we don't do that. When we run out of a cause, we cause that cause to continue because, and so I think there should be a lot of scrutiny for how money is allocated. Do you not think by placing such scrutiny on giving, you just prevent people from doing it in the first place? Like giving money is not virtuous unless it causes the right things. Even if it sounds good, we need to get away from making good sounding things being beyond scrutiny. It's like, you need to figure out what effects you're causing in the world.

SPEAKER_01

Right. And so, yeah. What I worry about is people, what I worry about is people. Respectfully you, and I didn't mean to make this personal, but you don't have time to do the due diligence on the organizations that you're giving money to. You're building an incredible business, changing your generation. So then you just don't bother. But if I said to you, here's an amazing organization, just trust me on it. Well, the scrutiny would say, don't do it. You like Harry, but you don't know. So it stops all giving and then good organizations that would have got money, don't get it.

SPEAKER_01

Whatever good organizations. This is totally like, you show us good organizations. They are getting a lot of money. Trust me. Money is being captured by really bad actors in these systems. You will very likely tell me about Mark Carnegie's libraries very soon, because that is the go-to example. That is a hundred something years ago. That's the thing that really worked. Rockefeller built hospitals. That wasn't enough. Carnegie built libraries, complete banger, right?

SPEAKER_01

No, when I thought good, I just thought of Jensen and Bloom Energy. How are we going to fund compute? Exactly. This is the thing. The world has, we have too much charity dollars. The problem with charity dollars is they can't be given to anything that has a self healing fitness function, which is a very fancy way of saying the words for profit, like markets voting of if a thing should exist and a not for profit, the world term, everyone should be deeply suspicious about because you basically said, oh, the best fitness function mechanism that planet earth has ever invented, the thing that's the only thing that's ever raised anyone out of poverty really, at scale, is the thing you're not participating in. So you're documenting that you're opting out of markets, but you will not tell us what your actual fitness function is. And fitness function is just like, how do you know if a game you're on is worth playing and continuing, right? Like, therefore the fitness function is going to be determined by anyone. It replaces merit of organization, the pull of individuals who is attracted to these places, the people who want to do something for which you have to use pull and the smoothest talkers, the people who it's not the builders who are doing it.

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] of markets, but you will not tell us what your actual fitness function is. And fitness function is just how do you know if a game you're on is worth playing, and

SPEAKER_01

continuing, right? Therefore the fitness function is going to be just determined by anyone. It replaces merit of organization, the pull of individuals who is attracted to these places, the people who want to do something for which you have to use pull and the smoothest talkers, the people who—it's not the builders who are doing it. They go and then become, you know, run these institutions. And by the way, this is not a bad faith take. This is the system that's set up. It's fine. And sometimes it works and yeah, great charities.

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] Do you believe in government intervention? I'm in Europe where we have a lot of government intervention. No, not really. Well, okay, so let me rephrase this. Yes. I am a fan of Friedrich List who is a Prussian long before James Hunt and Nicky Lauder's rivalry. It was Adam Smith, Laissez-Faire and Friedrich List and the Prussian school of economics. And so what the Prussian school says differently to Laissez-Faire is that the role of government is very simple. It's to define games that have externalities—societal thriving—and then completely get out of a game to then let the players in this game cause through means of competition extremely positive externalities to accrue to society, which happens automatically in profit-seeking markets because what a company does is it takes the potential value that exists, which is infinite, absolutely infinite, coalesces into products that other people then vote for. And the voting mechanism causes a larger supply chain and more supply of these products coming into society. And that creates wealth and

SPEAKER_01

then the wealth is part of the society and any dollar that's created from a place that brings new dollars into the system cycles seven times for society in a local way. So a dollar flowing into a community. This is why it's important to have local businesses. It cycles seven times for the payroll of people in there—into the company, then through payroll out and then to the barista's salary at the local Starbucks and so on. Money itself is amplifying. This is proven through mechanisms of trade and through debt creation by banks. So am I for government interventions? Governments are extremely bad at what they do. Everyone needs to know that the moment a government takes over anything, it will cost ten times as much, which is really bad because the second someone says let's run grocery stores as a government, there's going to just be a couple of hundred people like me who have to go and build companies to make up the wealth that just simply evaporates in that moment. One of the most inspiring things that humanity has ever done is outsource violence to governments because that creates the environment in which personal property can exist and personal property is the boundary condition and foundation of everything else I'm talking about.

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] We mentioned fears or concerns or what society's worrying about. One thing that worries me is bluntly Europe falling into this kind of chasm of irrelevance. It's why I started Project Europe, which I kindly support. You've got US and Canada and you also have Asia. What would your advice be, or if I placed you in charge of Europe for the future, what would you do to encourage growth and innovation in a relatively stagnating economy?

SPEAKER_01

I have lots of thoughts on this, of course. Canada has all the resources that planet Earth needs for literally everything, everything that we are going to do for the next 20 years. It's purely a choice that Canada ought to be the richest country on planet Earth. It can become that every moment at once. It's actually quite easy. It just has to be willing to build some mines. Which somehow is controversial, which I never heard of that. Are you proud of Canada's pushback on Trump? I've had him on the show multiple times. I would like to see—he's a friend. Yeah, I loved the interview. It was a very good interview. I think I watched the second one with Canada. Are you proud of him as a Canadian for bluntly standing up in an elegant and independent way? I can't say I'm proud of him for that. It's one of the greatest speeches I ever heard. I don't think it's a fully credible witness to the reality on the ground. I love a speech that is an ambition for a country. I personally disagree with the stance to the United States. I think Canadians are massively overfit to niceness. It's the best thing and the worst thing in a country—to prioritize niceness. It's certainly pleasant, but the problem is it leads to unkind lies, right? It means you're lying by omission. You're lying by saying things are fine when they aren't. Can you speak the truth is a much more important test. So unfortunately the way that intermeshes with the Trump administration is really brutal because it creates this sort of positive feedback loop inside of Canada. Because he is so unbelievably not nice in any which way you look at it, there's a Trump derangement syndrome in Canada that is just stunning. Sixty percent of people—more than sixty, I think the numbers have gone up—think that the United States is the largest risk to Canada, much larger than Russia or China would be. And

SPEAKER_01

And you think that's wrong? Of course it's wrong. It's because Canada is, Canada is—

SPEAKER_01

The truth is a much more important test. So unfortunately the way that intermeshes with the Trump administration is really brutal because it creates this positive feedback loop inside of Canada, which is because he is so unbelievably not nice. In any which way you look at it, there's a Trump derangement syndrome in Canada that is just stunning. 60% of people, more than 60, I think the numbers have gone up since people think that United States is the largest risk to Canada, much larger than Russia or China would be. And you think that's wrong? Of course it's wrong. It's because Canada is a small economy attached to a hegemon. There's been one winning strategy in Canada's history, which is win by helping America win.

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] Connie is saying that it's over. Everything he's doing, I'm agreeing with. It's like, hey, let's diversify the economy. Great idea. Let's get closer to Europe. Perfect. Let's go. Asia, let's go. I'm pro all the things. I just really don't think we need to choose. The obvious way for prosperity here is to produce shit out of pipelines, produce shit out of our industry, get resources that everyone needs and actually refine the stuff ourselves because we have the most educated workforce on planet earth here and we can literally do everything. The problem is, are you still in London? Canada started by trapping beaver pelts, sending to London, getting them turned into hats and then buying them back. It's just the Canadian self-story is we get the resources, other people make the money. We've never changed from that to making the end products. It's very rare that Canada does anything. It's like Canada Goose, Lululemon, Shopify, maybe Miller Lite. What other products exist from Canada? You mentioned that we over exaggerate the concern around the US or the threat that they pose. The thing that I think we were all not talking about is how every great American company is using frontier American models and then going, well, that's too expensive. So let's use open source Chinese models to get as close as we can to the benchmark set by US frontier models. These CCP funded models are basically powering a lot of the US startup ecosystem in many ways. Do you think the Chinese threat is underestimated?

SPEAKER_01

I mean, I think it's both underestimated and overestimated. I think the much bigger threat is that in a lot of countries, I think this happened in Spain already, and I think even in the United States, aside from social media, the moment the government has the ability to decide at what age children can use technologies, they will. It goes like taxes, right? AI has so many naysayers. We are going to tell kids they can't use AI. Kids will not stop using AI. What they will do is they will download Chinese models and you will never get another high school essay about Tiananmen Square as a consequence of that. Is that truly the world we want to create here where children are incentivized to get a monoculture of models that are trained and RLHF'd into a perspective? Chinese models are, especially if you switch them to Chinese and then ask something else to translate, it's a very collectivist worldview, which makes sense because it's a collectivist country. This is the predominant fight. All politics is just collectivism versus individualism. Everything else is people smoke screening this stuff. Do you let your kids have social media? I was going to ask this of one of the biggest technology leaders I can tell you after the show. That's one question we won't let you ask.

SPEAKER_01

This is going to be super unsatisfying to people because I feel people hope that I would have a very strong opinion on this that's actionable and I don't because for the craziest coincidence, my kids are totally uninterested in social media. They completely don't give a shit. They follow links to social media sometimes, but they have no interest in having accounts and they don't have phones. They've never asked for them. It's bizarre. I saw them when they were very small. They're on PCs. We do video games as a family. When phones came up, I said that a bunch of kids in his class are starting to get phones and they're just super distracted and it's cutting into their book reading time, which tells you a lot about Tristan. I said, yeah, at some point you will ask me for a phone and I'm going to say you will have to cash in your PC because you can only have one of those two things. It became a meme in the house and they're so into the PCs that it just never comes up. Honestly, I can't add much to this conversation. I also have three boys, which I think is a very important data point there because I think the situation with social media, for what it is, is very different there if gender has a different effect on them.

SPEAKER_01

Going back to our question, I'm making you the new president of Europe, which is a brilliantly American title, which doesn't exist obviously as I'm aware for anyone who's about to chastise me in the comments. What would you do to ensure Europe remains on a global stage? Well, you have to get rid of the climate cult first of all, because it's one of the most evil things that's been wrought on a population. So when you say climate cult, you mean what? Random green parties having as part of a founding myth that somehow nuclear power plants are bad and shit like this, but it's everywhere, right? We can't build incredibly

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] exist obviously as I'm aware for anyone who's about to chastise me in the comments. What would you do to ensure Europe remains on a global stage? Well, you have to get rid of the climate cult first of all, because it's one of the most evil things that's been wrought on population. So when you say climate cult, you mean what? Random green parties having as part of a founding myth that somehow nuclear power plants are bad, but it's everywhere, right? We can't build incredibly important infrastructure factories because some fucking frog breeds once in some fucking creek on the perimeter. If we would be in a saner world and someone would go and write a sci-fi book about the future and describe the shit that you actually have to do to do something on this planet, everyone would say the book would go nowhere because everyone's like, this is completely made up.

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] But actually we all live in a world where people do not understand that there's very few people who have a capability to truly build things. They need to be enabled by the village to build those things. And then they also have to be held accountable by the village. I think Europe, especially now that the UK has left the European Union, needs to double down on Prussian economic theory of Friedrich List and define excellent games that create internal markets. A country is defined by its internal government services of security, safety, property rights, body of law, policing and these kinds of things. Governments have no money. They can't make money. They can only take money by compulsion from people who create things or work. Which is fine because that is a mechanism by which they are doing these services that we deem valuable and build infrastructure. The infrastructure is a really interesting case because infrastructure is probably the most profitable thing that exists and ever has existed. Building highways changes everything and building an airport. Everyone talks about how much an airport costs every airport ever built. That's actually connected into the hub and spoke system on planet earth, probably running trillions of dollars of profits in societal value creation. Infrastructure is one of those things that businesses are really bad at making, and it sucks that we're committing businesses to have to build infrastructure because it doesn't fit into the timescales. Even long-term focused businesses can't really build infrastructure very well. You have the odd basics that can start a new city in a swamp, but that's not a way to do it. Infrastructure building is very good. You define games and you're therefore getting an economy that's growing. There's no speed limit for that. Then afterwards you can have a discussion about how you take the riches from this economy, the additional profits, and sculpt the economy that you want. This has been a path since enlightenment by which all progress happened.

SPEAKER_01

What were you wrong on that cost you the most? Most of the things you were wrong about are the paths not traveled, where you many years later understand that the counterfactual would be a better position. Lots of deals. I think my most public mistake was going into full on logistics and physical warehouse building just before AI got really good and we didn't have the ability to do both of those things at the same time. We actually had to abandon this thing. I still think the initial decision was right, which is how I value my performance. But I think this is actually starting to be harder to make that case because I now know about information I could have had that would have been available to me back then that would have discredited this path. I probably just got it wrong and maybe I should just admit this. That one sucked because it affected people's lives of employment. But I'm wrong all the time. I've been wrong more times than most people will ever be wrong because I do a lot of reps on it. I make falsifiable statements because I want people to falsify them. I'm unafraid of a conversation. I don't care that much about what people think about me, honestly.

SPEAKER_01

Why that with the weight of your decisions and the weight of your voice, when you speak 7,000 people follow you and with the frequency of your wrongness, that could be very costly? I think you've said before your job as a CEO is to inject chaos into an organization. I prefer to call it temperature these days because chaos is probably too negatively connotated. What is heat? Heat is atoms that jiggle. With enough heat, atoms, usually coming from molecules, with enough heat, molecules refuse into something maybe worth having more. That's what all of chemistry does. It's very hard to forge anything new at room temperature. Great leaders must be exothermic and must be a heat source for the company. It's a very different opinion than the custodial idea of leadership, which is also a valid position to take. I do not need to inject heat into any area that has heat. There's some areas that are so red hot because everyone's just...

SPEAKER_01

heat, molecules refuse into something maybe worth having more. That's what all of chemistry does. So, you know, I think it's very hard to forge anything new at room temperature. So I think great leaders must be exothermic and must be a heat source for the company. It's very different opinion than the custodial idea of leadership, which is also a valid position to take. I do not need to inject heat into any area that has heat, right? So that's not needed. There's some areas that are so red hot because everyone's just so into chasing innovation or incredible vision or whatever that my services are not needed here. And I get to play a completely different role in these areas. But those are usually not the ones I spend my time on because I spend my time on everything that's wrong. Why people should not overestimate how good these jobs are because you literally I have a folder. So one of my concessions to potentially I might call it vanity. I don't know if it's quite vanity, but maybe call it motivational plumbing is I have a part of my Obsidian folders that are just people that I respect who said things about things I built that are meaningful to me, little jolts of positivity and mini accomplishments. Cause every once in a while, especially you can handle a couple of days of this, but once it gets weeks, I only heard things that are going extraordinarily poorly or people making life decisions, which have incredibly deep consequences. Like months of work to figure out how to create continuity of an area that otherwise was going great or worse. Any of these things, you get a lot of people's health issues. It all affects companies, right? So sometimes you just get into these really dark places and then it's a nice pick me up. So I'm not completely detached emotionally from this. In fact, I'm enormously emotionally attached to Shopify. I think that's a common thing with founders too. So emotion is why I'm surprised when you said earlier you don't look at the ticker.

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] I never thought the company CEO I meet would say: No, it's not. The ticker has nothing to do with the company I'm building. The ticker is guessing at the fair market value of a company. I work on fair market value of a company. The ticker is just other people's game to make trades based on their assumptions of a future compounding fair market value. When has the ticker been most wrong?

SPEAKER_01

At the beginning of COVID. We, I think the ticker went up. I want to say a lot, a hundred percent or something more. And we did not get a hundred percent smarter at that moment. This is as a founder, especially someone who has lived with a ticker for 10, 11 years. This is really not surprising or confusing. I have not looked at the ticker in April. I know this for a fact. So it's probably much longer than that, but I definitely know I haven't looked in the last 23 days when we record this. Which by the way makes you a complete anomaly. Like I pretty much only interview public company CEOs now, and I've never met one like you.

SPEAKER_01

Again, it depends on where you are. It depends on what kind of company you're on. In some companies it also has more relevancy, right? If you run a gold mine, you have no differentiation in the product. You might have differentiation in the amount of mining rights. I talk with a gold mine guy. This is why this is my example here. I just thought it was funny. For them, technology is actually investor relations. If you are the CEO, your job is to be everywhere and play golf with everyone and be extremely charismatic because if you can somehow finagle your multiple to be slightly higher than the other gold mines, you just buy the other gold mines, right? It's consolidation. Your product is not the gold. Your product is actually your IR, investor relations. So yeah, that sounds like not an environment in which I would thrive.

SPEAKER_01

Sure. But I know why you're not a venture capitalist, Toby. So it's funny. Yeah, I think I would be very bad as a venture capitalist, I imagine. I tend to think I can onboard to anything. It wouldn't come natural to me. And therefore it would probably not what I would do. And I'm just too interested in making things. I will work every day of my life. [SPEAKER_00] Toby, I'm going to do a quick fire round with you. I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. What have you changed your mind on most in the last 12 months?

SPEAKER_01

One thing I'm wrestling with is I thought straight out of school engineers would have a really big advantage with no priors and immediately being AI native. And many of them are exceptional and are speed running their careers in ways. There's even younger people at universities. We had an intern with 13 from Waterloo, which still blows my mind. And he was not even in his first semester and his mom has to accompany him for classes, which I love this. And he's very good. It's just unbelievable. So we are seeing incredible career trajectory increases that I think

SPEAKER_01

and immediately being AI native. And many of them are exceptional and are speed running their careers in ways. And there's even younger people at universities. Like we had an intern with 13 from Waterloo, which still blows my mind. And he was not even in his first semester and his mom has to accompany him for classes, which I love. And by the way, he's very good. It's just unbelievable. So we are seeing incredible career trajectory increases that I think are coming here. But I had to change my mind here because initially I thought just having no priors would be better because we had to reinvent everything. Turns out the way authentic programming actually works. You give an initial problem, you give a task, it might come for a ticket afterwards. An engineer is constantly talking with the AI to steer it in the right direction. All engineers are massively underestimating how important the steering is. It's incredibly important. It's actually the same as programming. It's just very high level. And it turns out that having done a lot of reps and having seen a lot of those, senior engineers just steer these things in such a way that they can accomplish incredible feats in very little time. So I don't know what that means exactly, but it's something I had to change my mind on.

SPEAKER_01

What role does not exist today that will be incredibly common in five years time?

SPEAKER_01

There's something about this context engineering, which I had a hand in popularizing the term of. I think that will become more recognizably a role in companies that will potentially subsume a bunch of other more specialized roles right now. Honestly, it turns out I think people who've done engineering management and management in general are actually excellent AI programmers because they actually have been prompting intelligent agents for much longer than cloud code existed and they are just good at communicating. But no, I think increasingly the best work is to prompt other people and AIs directly as part of the same team. So I think there's going to be something that maybe some ascension path job that you can get into from product, from design or from engineering. That's something like a product builder role. That involves the coordination of intelligent actors to build products. It won't sound or look or be described as what I say, but that's the direction how to hear.

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] I mean, honestly, people who are good communicators are usually good thinkers because good communication usually is distillation of complex thoughts into unambiguous words. I mean, even when I say this, it just sounds like context engineering, doesn't it? Right? So I think that is becoming a very, very important role. Like if you're building a large scale AI system, we have one, which you think what river, which lives in Slack, and does some ludicrous amount of Shopify's engineering. Now people just talk to it over Slack and it's called river because Shopify has a very big mono repo. A mono repo is called world and rivers shape the world. So I think that's very poetic.

SPEAKER_00

River named herself. Like we first built her, then asked her what name she wants. And she came up with that. And that's kind of crazy. So river sits on Slack, does a lot of Shopify's engineering with people steering her through public Slack channels, which is awesome because then everyone learns from everyone else. [SPEAKER_01] What percent of code today at Shopify is AI generated? We just had Ali on. It's a fair deal over 50%. It's converting to much higher numbers. I don't think we've updated public numbers there, but it's many of our best engineers have not written code this year. Ever since December, like December changed everything. Opus changed everything.

SPEAKER_00

Does that excite you as someone who loves the craft?

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] Oh, I love it. It's so wonderful because I love the craft and I can, the craft is not lost. I also love mechanical watches, which make no sense, right? But they're selling more than ever. Right. Because people always overestimate, this is what growth is. Growth is not subtraction of things or replacement. It is just adding. There's more in the world, right? So we now have AI as well on top of all the other wonderful products we can consume. So anyway, I can sit down and write code when I want to do this. Sometimes I do want to do this. Often it's part of a steering, right? Like I write the part of a code that concerns itself with the data structures and how the data is persisted on disk, which unfortunately that's a German school of engineering, which is different from the computer science-y world of North America. I think North America is wrong. I think you should think about how data is persisted on disk above everything else in your databases and then you can plan the system with this. I still follow this and so work on this either by describing or by literally making the data access layer. Everything else can be vibe-coiled on top because I know the result will be excellent as long as the data structures are right. And maybe that changes in the next couple of months. But that's an area where I can definitely steer the AIs to get better results than they can do themselves for a little while longer. And then afterwards I'll do something else. And maybe I'm going to do it just for kicking it old school. But what my engineering ability allows me to do is reason about these systems, right? In a way that I can be a partner and a coworker with AI because I can ask it very specific questions to go chase down. And I have those same questions all my life. In every meeting I'm like, you really wonder what the data structure is here? Or how we persisting this or what we save or what we discard or what we re-derive in—

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] And then afterwards I'll do something else. Maybe I'm going to do it just for kicking it old school. But what my engineering ability allows me to do is reason about these systems, right? In a way that I can be a partner and a coworker with AI because I can ask it very specific questions to go chase down. And I have those same questions all my life. In every meeting I'm like, you really wonder what the data structure is here? Or how we're persisting this or what we save or what we discard or what we re-derive in a data warehouse instead of actually just writing it down in the first place. And I have my laptop open and my River open and then I can ask a question and I get a result. Because again, River can use the entire Mono report and just chase down whatever I'm asking her. Sorry, random one. Would you encourage your children to go to university? So they seem uninterested right now. I think my oldest is probably going to make a play for it. I definitely would not encourage them to go to university for being part of university. I would definitely encourage them to go get a degree, especially one that's hard to get into because then you're surrounded by people who also got into it. I think figuring out how to get in the room with people who really, really want to be in the room with a topic of something you care about is actually the cheat code for any career.

SPEAKER_00

Would joining a startup of the day not be better? So my bias would be that if you can be of value to a small company, that's the thing, right? You have to have the skills to actually be of value and the company agrees with you and sees that value, you should do it. But that's actually a wonderful test for both sides. An interview as a test, is it like both sides interview each other, right? That's what you should try. And then I think it's better than an alternative. Because again, it's much harder to get in a company both working for than it is to get into university. Do you believe in nepotism, Toby? Like, respectfully, if one of your kids apply for a startup job, the surname is relatively obvious.

SPEAKER_01

I remember my kids have the genes of my wife and me. They probably don't like, I think nepotism comes in if someone needs a little bit of help and I think so, but they're fine. Do your belief in nepotism? I think actually nepotism has a bad rep, frankly. It's annoying, but I'm starting to understand also, nepotism is probably just actually bad. I'm a very big fan. This is probably you can discern this from what I'm saying here of Thomas Sowell. And Thomas Sowell, I mean, everything he's ever said is incredibly smart. Amongst the many things worth quoting, I think in a book he wrote when he was already in his eighties is that one of his regrets about society is that we have spent the last 50 years replacing things that work with things that sound good. So, ever since reading this, I'm like, don't have a knee jerk reaction anymore against basically anything that I'm hearing about, but that sounds terrible because I just try to get to figuring out what is the redeeming value of nepotism? I think the answer is none. So merit double blind is the gold standard. Unfortunately, merit double blind is not the standard, right? It's very, very rare. So I think nepotism might be better than some of the crazy stuff people have been doing to decide who should be appointed into, especially in academia. Like in Canada, we have a big thing that's basically all the job postings for any kind of academic seats are now full on intersectionality, a fever dream, right? Find exactly a description that fits one person in terms of all the disadvantages they had in life. And which, I mean, ours comes from a good place and maybe also ends up having some, maybe it's an arbitrage sometimes because if there's all this countervailing forces there that prevented them from getting the jobs they're owed. And then on day one, the person you do find is a complete banger in the job and hats off to you, that you just played the system perfectly. In any other case, you just made a choice of prioritizing things that are not merit, right? Which again goes against enlightenment values that literally everything that anyone likes about planet Earth in Western society and the foundation of all the countries that essentially have net immigration, depending in a lot of ways. So I think we should probably keep to some of us. Final one for you. What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given? Like mine is you're never wrong to do the right thing and the right thing is often the hard thing. I think the best advice I've been given, but I haven't been giving it, but it's a rallying cry. I think that is just I kind of want to coalesce on that sentence just because it's memorable. And I think people can't hear it enough that you can just do things. At any point of time, the system exists to try to get to good outcomes. If you know what good outcomes are, you can step out of the system and give it a go. The cost is lower than ever and action causes information. And one of the best things that can possibly happen is you figure out something that there's actually a lot of reason why the system discourages it. The best limits to this, of course, there can't be that this needs to be a completely victimless endeavor. You can't have someone suffering for you, trying a thing. That's very important. No, people can't have negative consequences of these kinds of things because then you're just actually being an asshole, because you're dividing people and prioritizing your own gain over other people and fundamentally you're engaging in a zero-sum thing and in zero-sum environments, you should probably not run experiments.

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] (continuing from previous speaker)

SPEAKER_01

reason why the system discourages it. Now the best limits to this, of course, there can't be that this needs to be a completely victimless endeavor. You can't have someone suffering for you, trying a thing. That's very important. No, people can't have negative consequences of these kinds of things because then you're just actually being an asshole, because you're dividing people and prioritizing your own gain over other people and fundamentally you're engaging in a zero-sum thing and in zero-sum environments, you should probably not run experiments, but you should do, if you are in a zero-sum environment, you should figure out how to get a positive sum. And that's much more often possible than people imagine.

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] Toby, I'm not sure I've ever had quite such a broad ranging discussion. I'm not sure if most of your interviews quite cover the future of climate, Trump and Canada's relationship, the future of developers and organizations, but I've so enjoyed this. So thank you.

SPEAKER_01

It's the things I wrestle with. If you get me on a different time, I'll talk about different things. I just look again, what would be awesome if there were some people who really disagreed with everything I said, but are still listening at this point, right? Because that's all I want. It's all anyone wants. We just let's get back to having conversations, allow people to be wrong. I'm wrong all the time. It doesn't matter. So I think that's fine. And we can lower the temperature. We can realize there's some priors in society. Some things we've placed, which worked. I've made very few comments on what we ought to be doing. I mostly talked about creating the boundary conditions in which people can just do things, right? That's the genius of the world thing, the genius of the world we inherited, but our ancestors created ever since the enlightenment for us. It's that they created a sandbox in which people can do things. They take responsibility for doing things. They are personally accountable. They take personal accountability for the outcomes. They go to jail if they do something bad, but they are allowed to have property if they're right. Everyone who builds something is making an incredible Faustian bargain with society here in a world that discriminates against builders in a way, just on account of their products having worked. I own 6% of Shopify. That makes me incredibly wealthy. Yes. But it also means 94% of it are owned by other people. All of those people made a lot of money with the company. And that's not even talking about the customers and all the people employed by the customers of ours. There's probably 10 million people working day to day on Shopify. That is their job to do the thing that Shopify asked them to do, send out the products, deal with customer relations, all these kinds of things, build new websites and so on. That was always there and Shopify has brought it into existence in actual ways that can be consumed. We are not the only company; many do it and people vote right now, and hopefully for a long time, every month by paying the subscription. That Shopify's instantiation of this idea that needed to be pursued is the one that is valuable to them. There's such a belief in society that when there's a good thing, there must be a counter reaction. It's some kind of misapplication of Newtonian laws. Some things are just good. Some things are just super good. And the downsides might even be describable, but they just don't pale in the face of all the good that comes.

SPEAKER_01

It's like we said earlier though, which is the demonization of wealth. A lot of people you see in America thinking that to gain and to have a billionaire, they must have stolen from someone who doesn't have money. Show me one. You can't get to a billion dollars by stealing money. Maybe you can in some instantiations, but to talk about specifically the people who get their wealth by building companies have not stolen anything. They have created a product that people voted for. It's actually the most democratic thing that exists. It's vastly more democratic than any of the elections that we actually go casting ballots at. People shape the world around them by the way they allocate their money to products. Every time you buy something from a local shop, you're voting for the welfare and the future and the thriving of local shops in your area, not just the product that you purchase. There's nothing bad about that shopkeeper because they are putting themselves out there. They're working extremely hard. It's an irrational act to start a company. You're working extremely hard for yourself instead of working less hard for someone else. But you're actually creating another thing and other people get to have employment there and have jobs that work according to their lifestyle. So it's weird that they are putting this in contempt. I'm very pro constructive criticism, but constructive criticism is itself something that someone builds, right? There are people who can create excellent constructive criticism and I learn a lot from them. I'm fortunate in that I get a lot of constructive criticism as even just a public company CEO. You have some people write incredible memos externally that are really worth reading because they give you a perspective you didn't have. That's them building up a picture in the public mind about how to think about something. But there's also lazy and bad faith criticism or just hot takes and this kind of stuff that is actually incredibly corrosive and should have incredible contempt by people. We don't, but how many times do people who are saying something incredibly wrong look for all the things people have published during the COVID times.

SPEAKER_01

You have some people write incredible memos externally that are really worth reading. [SPEAKER_00] Because they give you a perspective you didn't have. And that's them building up a picture in the public mind about how to think about something. But there's also lazy and bad faith criticism or just hot takes and this kind of stuff that is actually incredibly corrosive and should be held in incredible contempt by people.

SPEAKER_01

And we don't. But how many times do people who are saying something incredibly wrong, look at all the things people have published during COVID times, or even just climate panic pieces. How many times have you actually posted revisions to this, right? It's very rare. And so you realize it wasn't about truth, right? Otherwise they would do it. Because that's the correct thing to do if you were wrong. The ice caps did not melt. In fact, we are in the years that they told us the ice caps would be gone. [SPEAKER_00] Right.

SPEAKER_01

And so that doesn't mean there is no climate change. Climate change is happening all the time. It's just that it's not inducing panic. You're not allowed to. I'm very pro free speech. Free speech is a mechanism of self-healing for everything else related to property and classical liberalism. And so it's worth protecting. But there is no absolute free speech, right? You can't scream fire in a cinema. In almost any place like that, you're going to the precinct afterwards. But somehow you can do it in media or if the timeframe is long, then it's fine. [SPEAKER_00] Do you worry about that moving forwards when the most common response on Twitter is, Grok, is this true?

SPEAKER_01

No, I think I'm so bullish about the future. There was an effort mismatch in terms of bad faith acting. It's really easy to do. It's one assertion, right? There's famously this Stalinist kind of thing. For every man, there's a combination of words that will undo him. And so it doesn't need to be true, but it just exists. There's some accusation that is plausible enough that the person disappears afterwards. [SPEAKER_00] I mean, I think this was specifically a case in the Soviet Union. It's always true when there's a lot of collectivism around, which is really just centralization of power of the state.

SPEAKER_01

Fact-checking is very hard. It's asynchronous warfare. It's information terrorism to take a very absurdist position on it. Disproving that it's not true is a lot more work than saying the thing. And so you can ask, there's not that many bad faith actors. It's actually a small number, but they can be incredibly prolific and seed all sorts of important things. I think AI is going to move the power back to good guys, I believe. Or not even like, that's actually wrong framing. There's no good and bad. Everyone's good in their own local system and some people have a wrong system. And this is why we need conversations to arc them to the valuable ones in society.

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] I mean, this is the nicest way to be. You can't actually believe that. There are malicious bad actors who will use AI to exploit. Oh, sorry, I didn't say this. You're completely right. There is also, especially on a societal level and an individual level. On an individual level, which is the one we document, right, there's going to be so much happening. Voice cloning, hacking stuff, all software turns out to probably not be good enough in terms of security. That's going to be a whole lot of bullshit we will have to deal with. [SPEAKER_00] Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01

However, the same models can also write fixes for these kinds of things. In fact, being able to apply intelligence in the form of artificial intelligence to the side of preventing fraud, I think that shift would happen here. I think we're actually going to get a much better way. Even claim testing, is a statement true, it's a thing that can be done by a council of models, especially like Chinese trained model, Germany trained, France trained model. Let's get everyone's opinion on something and just give different perspectives and synthesis.

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] Building the thing I just said, I can do by just going to one of those terminals, taking the transcript of just the words, and two or three more steers and I can put this on the internet and it will work. I would have to pay for it because tokens are expensive right now, but suddenly we have a new institution, which is, well, what does everyone think? What's the council saying about this claim? So we're going in a world where I think less of airwaves will be dominated by bored people who act in bad faith, because the other side has the ability to push back. The Claude, the Grok thing is sort of a primordial version of this, that's what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_01

uh, printing, uh, shop in my, my, my, my case, um, to understand that a business formation is something that real humans can do and, and, and, and, and that gives employment and these kind of things. You can actually, I mean, first of all, you learn that anyway. And then all the various tasks, your handy sidekick AI will, um, who acts as your co-founder will just tell you. Right.

SPEAKER_00

So, so when we, so if we're staying flat in the hope for all the layoffs that we see today, is that efficiency gains from AI or is that over hiring in a COVID era?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, it's overhired. Like AI will change the mix of jobs. No, no doubt. Um, what you see right now is not AI layoffs. It was just like the companies that are really slow that like over hire, just like everyone else, um, um, doing it now. What you will see is like AI is going to be blamed for absolutely everything, right? Like, because it's like, it's the perfect scapegoat. It's the perfect Girardian scapegoat for everything, right? Like, it's like, it can't fight back. It's like, um, in fact, um, you can beautifully, uh, find communities, which I think are entirely wrong, but like they are around.

SPEAKER_01

There's people who are talking very eloquently, um, uh, about, uh, the dangers of AI even past jobs. And like, it's like, like, like my industry has been gaslighting, uh, everyone into like, uh, AI fear and like sci-fi has done it for the 60 years before that too. And so it's like, like, I don't even know who's like supposed to be on, on, on AI side. That doesn't mean like, but like, it's just like incredible. Like it's like, it's objectively like mind-blowingly making my life better in every which way, like everything.

SPEAKER_00

Do you think you have a utopian lens? When I look at what Claude can do when it comes to social media design, I'm being blunt. Uh, a lot of tasks, which are not actually that difficult, but they are execution oriented. Um, I know I've done them, so people can't be upset with me for it. Um, Claude does it very well now. Like, how do you keep that utopian mind with the recognition that most of these tasks are easily replaceable with agents?

SPEAKER_01

Look, because none of the people who are doing jobs that are just tasks for other people have good jobs. Like, those are not good jobs. Being a, like a, like an automated task queue is not a great job. Great jobs are like things that you have agency and can produce things and make things.

SPEAKER_00

Do you think everyone can have a great job though?

SPEAKER_01

Like, look, lots of people who are right now rich choose not to work. Right? Like this is a very, very common thing. Right? So like I, I, lots of my friends are telling me like, what the fuck are you doing Toby? Um, uh, and I'm just like, Hey, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm born bread, uh, for, for working. I, I, I'm like, I'm, I'm like, don't ask the, um, don't ask a rain cloud to do the job of the sun. Right? Like, it's like, I, I'm like, this is my task and I, I, this is what I do. Um, and maybe some people aren't, um, lots of people, what they do on a weekend or what they do, um, in the evening or for some extra dollar, like give guitar lessons or so is vastly

SPEAKER_01

more productive for society. But then, uh, the, the, the cashier job at the supermarket, right? Or the, um, uh, these kinds of things. So like, I think, I think people will get options. I, I, I think, uh, you know, products that get enormously cheap or purchasing power is going to go up like crazy. Um, um, and, uh, people will be able to make choices. Uh, we will find no new ways of, um, working together. We will, um, find much more liquid ways of moving money around for value, um, generated. You know, I, I know, uh, multiple people who have done, build companies, they sold the companies, uh, really, really well.

SPEAKER_01

And they became essentially gentlemen scientists or gentlemen programmers. Like, you know, most of us who use cloud code use it through ghost, ghosty, uh, on a Mac, or, uh, usually ghosty is a, like a terminal application. It's just like perfect, right? Like, and it's like, it's such a weird thing to have spent your time doing this, but like, um, the author chose to, uh, after his sold his company to by hand, make a piece like a, like a perfectly crafted piece of software that he thought needed to exist. And now everyone agrees with him on how that it needed to exist because we built like everything on it.

SPEAKER_01

Um, I have like 15 ghosty terminals on my desktop all around you right now. Like, so, um, which I'm, uh, uh, ignoring, um, because we're having a fun conversation here. Um, but I wouldn't, if, uh, you know, I would be on a phone call with, uh, some, uh, legal necessity. Yeah. Like, uh, telling through ghosty to my clankers what, uh, needs building at Shopify. And so, um, you know, that's what we live in. So I, I, I think we are all gonna get figure, figure out like, um, remarkable ways. Like, like think about just how much, how good we are at coming up with new jobs. We are incredible at this.

SPEAKER_00

Like, it will never stop being incredible at this. Like, of the top 10 best paid jobs today, eight did not exist 20 years ago.

SPEAKER_01

It's a brilliant start. And that is going to be true in 10 years too, and 10 years after that. And so, um, like my favorite example of this is like, again, a motor squad guy is formula one. Like formula one is one of the biggest spectacles providing the best jobs. There's 800 people building an engine, um, uh, at, at Mercedes and at every one of the engine manufacturers. 800 people are building, are living in the perpetual golden age of, of, of, of this type of industrial mechanical engineering. Everything matters. It's all skill. They're getting scorecard every weekend, how they are doing compared to everyone else.

SPEAKER_01

They are basically in like, um, engineering world championship. And that's the same for aerodynamics team and chassis team and so on. And it's a sport named after rule book. Think about this. Like it's, it's like formula one is literally the name. It's not, it's not the name of a sport. It's the name of a rule book, which is called formula one because the, uh, the, the sport falls out of a rule book and it's this thick you can get. It is actually, I have a printed version of it. It's absolutely fascinating. Um, and, uh, uh, uh, you know, like, um, so that's the 800 people there. Another 800 people, uh, work on the car and then the drivers and all that.

SPEAKER_01

Like this, we just made this up, right? Like, it's, it's like this, this is all, and all of our lives is richer because it exists, I think. Um, because...

SPEAKER_00

My favorite thing about formula one is actually though, it's the importance of storytelling. I, uh, if you follow formula one for 10 years, you'll remember it was Bernie Eccleston and a bluntly an aging sport with middle aged to older man only liking it with a really decaying audience. Drive to survive saved the sport in many respects. 100%.

SPEAKER_01

Because it brought the best part out, which was accessible to the people who really, really, really worked hard on pulling the sort of story. And like, like, um, if you watch Rush, uh, like, you know, I grew up in Germany, so, um, you know, Nikki Lauda was like a hero in the Germanic, like he was everywhere, right? Like, and what a story that is, right? And if you, if you haven't, uh, listened to this and haven't watched the movie, just definitely watch, watch Rush. It's like, it's one of the greatest, like the sport has had its heroes and its nemesises and its, its rivalries, uh, in, in such a way, but it couldn't get it out until, um, it got

SPEAKER_01

combined with, you know, media essentially Hollywood and like, uh, and, and, uh, um, uh, Liberty media. And just like, so it's like bringing like, think about how much growth is and therefore how much entertainment and delight just by putting pieces together in a new way, right? Like it's like aging sport about a rule book plus spectacle ends up being something that's like of way more value than you would ever imagine. And I, I just feel like we find, we will find a lot of that. Um, we were very, the world is very impoverished by, um, how expensive it was to make software at any given time. There's a limiting factor in the world, um, for, for why things can't grow faster.

SPEAKER_01

Right. Uh, and, and, and of course growth creates wealth, uh, well, growth doesn't create wealth, growth brings wealth from resources essentially into the economies. Um, that's what it does. Um, uh, if you've built a company, you are causing, uh, wealth to be created, like it like to be brought from the hypothetical things that could exist into the actual things. And once things are actual, then people can use money to move, uh, uh, wealth around. And, um, uh, this is, uh, and this is where for, um, our economies grow. Um, I feel like this is worth saying because there's an enormous amount, at least half of

SPEAKER_01

population is utterly confused about, uh, how this all works and, uh, makes very, very bad choices due to this. So, um, proviso and, um, uh.

SPEAKER_00

Do you worry, do you worry that the US hates wealth more than ever before? You know, you said about your friends who stopped working. I have many of those friends, but there is a hatred towards wealth that has never been so visible in my eyes as an outsider looking in at the US.

SPEAKER_01

I mean, I think we are probably at a high watermark for the United States, but it's still sufficiently low that it, uh, it's, it's, it's, it's fine and easily can get into self-healing. I, I, look, I think, I mean, honestly, the more wealth, uh, and resources an entity or even an individual has, the more deserving of scrutiny they are. Like the thing that isn't working right now is that the, um, the process of figuring out who's additive and who isn't is completely broken. It's, it's, it's owned by people, uh, people acting in utterly bad faith. Um, so.

SPEAKER_00

What do you mean by that, Toby?

SPEAKER_01

I mean, we should like, there's just simply no chance that we shouldn't be sort of deeply, deeply, deeply, in fact, daily thankful for what Elon is doing on planet Earth. Like he's so singular. Like I, I, my car, I did not touch the steering wheel of my car this morning, right? Like I, it just like drove me. It also didn't like put, uses any, uh, gasoline. I, I, I don't care particularly about this, but that's just like fucking hell. That's cool to have that option. And, um, it's also an amazing car. So like I have a Model Y, I love it. And so, and by the way, that Model Y that I, I love is like a car that is incredibly affordable compared to the norms of cars, right?

SPEAKER_01

Like, um, um, I, it's better than any of the, whatever fucking like Koenigseggs I could, could potentially buy. I have no interest in those because they're not as good as a car. Then I'm going on a longer trip with that car. I also put a Starlink unit into the back, uh, and, and, and just like, um, you know, if someone else drives, I can work from, from, from there. That's also Elon. And so like, and then usually I open my phone and talk to like the planet Earth. Increasingly, I don't know if you're an ex, what you will see in this like, you're gonna, you're getting a lot of replies from people in Japan.

SPEAKER_01

Turns out like, uh, like just, you know, like Hitchhiker's Guide, like, uh, you know, the bubble fish, um, you know, like that, you know, how much, how central that is to the story. And it's like, just like, cool, you know what the biggest chair, your thoughts, good or bad system on planet Earth is X right now. And, um, um, uh, where the biggest, um, uh, one to N at least, um, biggest follower accounts. And so, you know, there's no barriers anymore. You just talk some, someone, someone says something really, really smart in, in, uh, French or Arabic or any, any other language. And I see it in my feet and like, if you can have a conversation in English back and they,

SPEAKER_01

they see it in like, like, and so on and so on and so on. I, I, I will spend the rest of his podcast talking about the incredible, uh, gifts that he's made. And of course he's captured some very small amount of like percentage point of, uh, of, of all the, um, uh, from the hypothetical value that exists all around us. Um, he actualized, uh, like a tremendous amount and, and captured some of his for himself, which even reuses to do more of it and like, he's like the one man engine. I'm just like, I, I, I'm, I'm marveling at this and in a, in a way that like, holy shit, how cool is it that we live in a, on a, in a planet where when you go through the list

SPEAKER_01

of the richest people on planet earth, all of them have built something. And that's like incredible. So what I really mean is not about Elon. What I really mean is the misattribution of who we should be angry at. Um, and so, um, it's okay to be, um, to, to, to have a lot of questions of rich people who would like inherited their wealth and then use it poorly. Um, or come to it by divorce, for instance, or like if, if, if you have not created for wealth, you very much are custodian of a wealth and you need to use gainfully for society. And I think what's really sucks in the world is that we are prioritizing things that sound

SPEAKER_01

good over things that work and in the way, uh, like, I mean, we're prioritizing real people don't, everyone knows exactly what's good. When you talk to them, it's just that media, like, especially state run media and, uh, and, and, and sort of, uh, uh, distorting media, like, uh, the stuff that's been around for a while is, um, you know, just hasn't like, is on a beat that just like, it's very intentionally trying to obscure, uh, what to be upset with. And so, um,

SPEAKER_00

Well, if we, if we just combine those two together, media is kind of distorting what to be angry about. I remember when, um, Jeff Bezos's wife gave some extremely large amount of money. I can't remember what it is. So, and they kind of then chastised her for giving it away inefficiently or to the wrong organizations or to the wrong people. And I was like, my God, But that's a good part. So this is what I want more of. So, so maybe we are on different sides on this, but like I, I, uh, um, again, giving something money, ideally through a transaction,

SPEAKER_01

like any, so someone starts a Shopify store, sells a new thing, ethically sourced, uh, leather jackets, whatever. When you purchase this, presumably it's going to be slightly more expensive than leather. Um, um, but what you do is you make a vote for it. You make a vote, that you think this is a product that should exist and you vote for free money, right? Like, and what will happen afterwards? It's like that creates resources for a company. And that means, um, uh, it's a viable product. Uh, they can employ people. It's a vote for everything that made this. It's also a vote for the supply chain that it was created. Like

SPEAKER_01

the ethically sourced leather is now has a customer that's viable, an additional one. Therefore, the numbers go up, therefore the factories can go, uh, like the production can ramp and eventually like it's going to come down in price and therefore it might even be, um, in fact, the synthetic leather, there's a, the potential is to make it a cheaper event. Um, uh, then, um, uh, the alternative that some people have, uh, um, you know, just like a lot of issues with. The point is every dollar everyone spends is a vote. Real democracy actually happens by, uh, capital allocation that's distributed. This is also why we need markets and, uh, and,

SPEAKER_01

and, and, um, um, why capitalism works because capitalism is, uh, capitalism causes markets. Uh, capitalism doesn't work intrinsically. It's, it's, it's like, it just happens to be the thing that, uh, is, uh, causes the most, uh, intelligence to be, um, imbued into the markets because it's the least distorted. When money is used, you should figure out what the second and third order effects are of this. And like, I think, look, if, if you're very internet, this is sort of like hot of the presses, but it's just like pissing me off to such an unbelievable degree that I just can't stop thinking about it. Maybe maybe really deserve disarming example

SPEAKER_01

of this is I went to a conference once, like I stayed to like went to a Ruby conference, like 2004, like five, maybe first con Ruby conference. I think first programming conference I ever went to. And, um, um, I stayed for weekend because at the same hotel, there was another tech conference, which was, um, uh, a conference called, well, it doesn't really matter, but it was for object oriented programming conference. And, you know, basically the first talk was like, guys, I think we won. So not quite sure what we're supposed to talk about because everyone's, uh, writing code object oriented right now. And then so, um, it was

SPEAKER_01

hilarious. I love the honesty is, this is the kind of honesty you can only find amongst nerds. I think they actually, I don't know if it ended up being held again, but like I, I think everyone was just sort of like doing a victory lap over the cause. And so, um, uh, in real world, we don't do that. When, when we run out of a cause, we cause that cause to, uh, continue because, um, and so I think there should be a lot of scrutiny for how money is allocated. Do you not think by placing such scrutiny on giving, you just prevent people from doing it in the first place? Like giving money is not virtuous unless it causes the right things.

SPEAKER_01

Even if it sounds good, we need to get away from making good sounding things, uh, being like sort of beyond scrutiny. Like, it's like, you need to figure, you need to look at the data. You, you, you really need to figure out what effects you're causing in the world. Right. And so, um, yeah. What I worry about is people, what I worry about is people like respectfully you, and I didn't mean to make this personal, but you, you don't have time to do the DD on the organizations that you're giving money to. You're building an incredible business, changing your generation. So then you just don't bother. But if I said to you, here's an amazing organization, just

SPEAKER_01

trust me on it. Well, the scrutiny would say, don't fricking do it. You like Harry, but you don't know. So it stops all giving and then good organizations that would have got money, don't get it. Whatever good organizations. This is, this is totally like you, you, you show us good organizations. They are getting a lot of money. Trust me. Money is being captured by really bad actors in these systems. You will very likely tell me about, uh, Mark Carnegie's libraries very soon, because that is the go-to example. That is a hundred something years ago. Like that, that's the thing that really worked. Rockefeller built hospitals. That wasn't enough. Um, uh,

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Carnegie built libraries, complete banger, right? Like, so, um, No, when I thought good, I just thought of Jensen and Bloom Energy. How are we going to fund compute? Exactly. This is the thing. Like, it's like the world has like, we have too much charity dollars. The problem with charity dollars is they can't be given to anything that has, um, a, uh, a self healing fitness function, like, which is very fancy way of saying the words for profit, like markets voting of if a thing should exist and like a not for profit, like the world term, everyone should be deeply suspicious about because you basically said,

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Oh, the best fitness function mechanism that planet earth has ever invented. The thing that's has the only thing that's ever raised anyone out of poverty really, um, at, at scale, um, is the thing you're not participating in. So, so you, you, you're documenting that you're opting out

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of markets, but you will not tell us what your actual, uh, like, uh, fitness function is. And fitness function is just like, how, uh, do you know if a game you're on is worth playing, uh, and

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continuing, right? Like, therefore the fitness function is going to be just determined by anyone. It replaces merit of organization, um, the pull of individuals who is attracted to these places, the people who want to do something that, uh, for which you have to use, um, you know, pull and, um, um, you know, the, the smoothest talkers, the people who it's not the builders who are doing it. Um, they go and like, then, uh, become, uh, you know, run these institutions. And by the way, this is not a bad faith take. This is, this is the system that's set up. It's fine. Like, and you know, sometimes it works and like, um, yeah, great charities.

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Do you believe in government intervention? I'm in Europe where we have a lot of government intervention. No, not really. Um, I, uh, well, I mean, okay, so let me rephrase this. Yes. Um, in, I am a fan of Friedrich List who is a Prussian long before James Hunt and Nicky Lauder's rivalry. It was, um, Adam Smith, Lasse Faire and, and Friedrich List and the Prussian school of, um, uh, like, uh, uh, economics. And so, um, I, what the Prussian school says differently to Lasse Faire is that, um, the role of government is very simple. It's to define games that have as externalities, um,

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uh, societal, uh, thriving and, uh, then completely get out of a game, uh, to then, um, uh, let the players in this game cause through, for means of competition, um, extremely positive externalities to accrue to society, which, you know, again, happens automatically, um, in, uh, uh, profit seeking markets because again, what a company does is it takes, um, the potential, uh, potential value that exists, which is infinite, absolutely infinite, coalesces into products that other people then vote for. And again, the voting mechanism causes then a larger supply chain and more of a supply of these products coming into society. And then, um, that creates a wealth and

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then the wealth is, uh, part of the society and any dollar that's created, um, from in, in a place that brings new dollars into the system cycles seven times for, uh, uh, for society, um, um, and, uh, in a, in a local way. So dollar flowing into like a community. So this is why it's important to have local businesses, um, then cycles seven times for the payroll of people in there, like again, into the company, then into, um, um, through, um, payroll out and then to the barista's, uh, salary at the, at the start, local Starbucks and so on, so on, so on. So, um, money itself is amplifying. Um,

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this, this is proven through mechanisms of trade and also through, um, uh, debt creation by banks. Um, so am I for government interventions? Governments are extremely bad at what they do. Uh, everyone needs to know that like the moment a government takes over anything, it will cost 10 times as much, which is really, really, really bad because it just like, you literally can like the second someone says, let's run grocery stores, um, uh, as a government, um, there's going to just be like a couple of hundred people like me have to go and, uh, like, uh, build companies to make up the wealth

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that just simply evaporates in this moment, right? Like, so one, one of the most inspiring things that humanity has ever done is outsource, uh, uh, violence to, uh, governments, um, because, uh, that is causing, uh, you know, just like that creates the environment in which personal property

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can exist and personal property is the boundary condition and foundation of everything else I'm talking about. We, we mentioned kind of fears or concerns or what, where society's worrying. One thing that worries me is bluntly Europe falling into this kind of chasm of irrelevance. It's why I started Project Europe, which kindly support it. Um, you've got US and Canada and you also have Asia. What would your advice be, or if I placed you in charge of Europe for the future, what would

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you do to encourage growth and innovation in a relatively stagnating economy? I have lots of thoughts on this, of course. Canada has, uh, all the resources that planet Earth needs for literally everything, uh, everything that we are going to do for the next 20 years. Um, it's, it's, it's purely a choice that Canada ought to be the richest country on planet Earth. Um, um, so it can, it can become that every moment at once. It's, it's actually quite easy. Um, uh, uh, it just has to be willing to build some minds, right? Like, um, so which somehow is controversial, uh, which, um, I never heard of that. Are you proud of Connie's pushback on Trump? I've had him on the show

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multiple times. I would like to see he's a friend. Yeah, I love the interview. It was a very good interview. I think I watched the second one with, um, Connie. Are you proud of him as a Canadian for like bluntly standing up in an elegant and independent way? I can't say I'm proud of him for that. I, I, it's the greatest, it's one of the greatest speeches I ever heard. I don't think it's a full credible witness to the reality on the ground. I, I, I just like, I, I also love a speech that is an ambition for, for, for a country. I personally disagree with, uh, uh, the stance to the United

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States. I, um, I think Canadians are massively overfit to, um, niceness. Like it's kind of the best thing and the worst thing, uh, in a country is like to, to, to prioritize niceness. Um, because it's like, I mean, it's certainly pleasant, but the problem is it leads to, it leads to, uh, unkind lies, right? Like it's like, it's, it's means like you're lying by omission. You're lying, um, by saying things are fine when they aren't, right? Like it's, it's like, this is, this is a, you know, can you speak the truth is a much more important test. So unfortunately the way that intermeshes with the Trump

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administration is, is, is really brutal because it creates this sort of positive feedback loop inside of Canada, which is because he is so unbelievably not nice. Um, in, in any which way you look at, there's a Trump, Trump derangement syndrome in Canada that is just stunning. 60% of people, more than 60, I think the numbers have gone up since people think that United States is the largest risk to Canada, like much larger than like Russia or China would be. And, um, And you think that's wrong? Of course it's wrong. It's because Canada is like, Canada is, Canada is a small economy attached to, uh, um, hegemon. There's been one winning strategy in Canada's history, um,

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uh, which is, um, win by helping America win. And that's like, Connie is saying that it's over. Like everything he's doing, I'm agreeing with. Like, it's like, hey, let's diversify the economy. Bang idea. Let's, uh, get closer to Europe. Perfect. Let's go. Um, Asia, let's go. Um, like I, I'm pro all the things. I just really don't think we need to choose. Like, it's like, like the obvious way for prosperity here is to, um, but for shit out of,

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uh, pipelines, but the shit of our industry, like get resources that everyone needs fucking starting to actually refine the stuff ourselves because like we have the high, the most educated, uh, workforce on planet earth here and we can literally do everything. It's just, the problem is, uh, you think you, are you still in London? Like we, Canada started, um, uh, for, um, trapping beaver pelts, sending to London, getting them turned into heads and then buying them back. Right? Like, it's just like, this is the Canadian self story is we get the resources, other people make the money.

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And so we've never changed from that. Make the end products, uh, usually. And so therefore, uh, it's, it's very, it's very, very rare that Canada does anything. It's like, Canada Goose, Lululemon, Shopify, maybe Miller Lite. Like, it was like, that what, what other products exist from Canada? You, you, you mentioned that like, we over exaggerate the, the concern there around the US or the threat that they pose. The thing that I think we were all like not talking about is how every great American company is using frontier American models and then going, well, that's too expensive. So let's use open source

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Chinese models to get as close as we can to the benchmark set by US frontier models. And it's like these CCP funded models are basically powering a lot of the US startup ecosystem in many ways. Do you think the Chinese threat is underestimated? I mean, I think it's both underestimated and overestimated, but like, uh, you know, I think the much more bigger threat is that, uh, uh, in a lot of countries, I think this happened in Spain already. And I think even in the United States, social media aside, like the moment the government has the ability to, uh, decide at which age, uh, children can use,

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uh, uh, technologies, they will, um, it like, it's goes like taxes, right? Like, it's just like AI has so many naysayers. Like we are going to tell kids they can't use AI. Kids will not stop using AI. What they will do is they will download Chinese models and you will never ever, ever get another high school essay about Tiananmen Square as a consequence of that. So, um, is that truly the word we want to create here where, um, uh, children are, um, incentivized to, uh, get a monoculture of like, because models are trained, uh, uh, and, uh, RLF, HF'd into, um, a perspective. Chinese models are, I mean, especially if you

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switch them to Chinese and then ask something else to translate, it's, it's a very collectivist worldview, which makes sense because the collectivist country, I mean, this is the predominant fight, like all politics is just collectivism, this individualism, right? Like it's, it's, it's everything else is, uh, people, um, smoke screening, this stuff. Um, do you let your kids have social media? I was going to ask this of one of the biggest technology leaders I can tell you after the show. So it's really weird. That's one question we won't let you ask. This is going to be super, super unsatisfying to people because I feel people hope that I would

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have a very strong opinion of this that's actionable and I don't because for the craziest coincidence, my kids are totally uninterested in social media. Um, like they just don't, they completely don't give a shit. They follow links to, uh, social media sometimes, but they have no interest in being, having accounts and they don't have phones. They've never asked for them. It's like, it's bizarre. Um, I saw them when they were very small. So they're PCs, right? Like we, because we, we make, we do video games, uh, as a family. And, um, I once, I've probably just ran my mouth. I, I, I, when, when, when phones came up, it's like,

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I think Tristan and I was, I said that, um, like a bunch of kids, uh, in his class are starting to get phones and they're just super distracted. Um, um, and it's cutting into their book reading time,

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which I mean, tells you a lot about Tristan. Um, and then I said, yeah, like, I mean, at some point you will ask me for a phone and I'm gonna, you will have to cash in your PC because you can only have one of those two things. And some of it became the meme in the house and they're just like so into the PCs that like, it just never comes up. So honestly, I, I, I can't add much to this, uh, uh, conversation. I also have three boys, which I think, um, is a very important, uh, sort of data point there because I think the situation with social media, if for what it is, it's like very

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different there, um, if the genders has a different effect on them. Going back to our question,

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I'm making you the new president of Europe, which is a brilliantly American title, um, which doesn't exist obviously as I'm aware for anyone who's about to chastise me in the comments. What would you do to ensure Europe remains on a global stage? Well, you have to get rid of, uh, uh, uh, the, uh, climate cult first of all, um, because it's just like, like, I mean, it's one of the most evil things that's been wrought on, uh, on, on population. Um, so when you say climate cult, you mean what? Like, random green parties, like, having as part of a founding myth that somehow nuclear power plants are bad and

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shit like this, but like, it's everywhere, right? Like, like, like, we can't build, um, incredibly important infrastructure factories because some fucking frog breeds once in some fucking creek on the perimeter and like, to the shit, right? Like, like, what the fuck is like this, this, you know, if, if we would be in a saner world, um, and, uh, someone would go and like write a, uh, sort of sci-fi book about the future and describe the shit that you actually have to do to do something on this plant,

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it, everyone, the book would go nowhere because everyone's like, this is just like completely made up. So, um, uh, but actually we all live in a world where just like this people do not understand that there's very few people who, uh, have a capability to truly build things. Um, and they need to be enabled by, uh, um, the village, um, uh, to, to build those things. And then they also have to be held accountable by the village. Again, I think Europe, especially now that the UK has left the European Union needs to double down on Prussian, uh, uh, economic theory, uh, of Friedrich List and his,

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uh, co-conspirators and just define excellent games that create internal markets. You know, a country is defined by its, uh, you know, like sort of internal, uh, um, again, government services of, you know, like security, safety, uh, property rights, uh, body of law, um, policing and, um,

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these kind of things, um, governments have no money. Uh, they, they can't make money. Uh, like, um, they can only take money by compulsion, right? Like from people, uh, who create things or, or, or, um, uh, work. So, which is fine because that is a funny mechanism by which then, um, um, um,

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uh, they are doing these services that we deem valuable and build infrastructure and so on. And I mean, the, the, the, the infrastructure is a really interesting case because infrastructure

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has, it's probably the most profitable thing that exists and ever has been existed. Like just

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building highways, like changes everything and, uh, building an airport. Everyone's about how much an airport costs every airport ever built. Um, uh, like that, that's actually like connected into the sort of hub and spoke system on planet earth is, is probably like, I mean, especially the older ones are probably running trillions of dollars of profits in societal true, uh, value creation. Um, so infrastructure is like one of those things that businesses are really bad at making, and it sucks that we committing businesses to have to build infrastructure of this thing because it just doesn't actually fit into the timescales. Like even the long-term focused businesses can't

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really build infrastructure very well. So, um, you know, you have the odds basics that can start a new city in a swamp. Um, but that's going to be just like, it's not a way to do it. Um, so infrastructure building is very good. And, uh, in the end you define games, um, uh, and, uh, you are therefore getting an economy that's growing. And by the way, there's no speed limit, right? Like, um, for, for that. And, um, then afterwards you can have a discussion about like, how do you take the riches from this economy, like the, the, the, the additional profits, um, and then sculpt the economy that you want. And this has been like ever since enlightenment, this has been

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a path by which all, you know, progress happened. What were you wrong on that cost you the most? Very often, um, uh, most of the things you were wrong about are like, uh, the paths not traveled, um, and, uh, sort of, uh, where you many years later understand that the counterfactual would be like a better position. Um, that's, I mean, lots and lots of deals. I think my most public mistake was, um, going into, um, full on logistics and, uh, physical warehouse, um, um, uh, building just before AI got really good and not like, and we didn't have the ability to, uh, you know, do both of those

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things at the same time. So we, we actually had to like abandon this thing. I still think the initial decision was right. So, which is actually how I value at my, um, uh, performance. Um, but, um, um, um, actually I think this is actually starting to be harder to make that case because I now know about information I could have had and would have been available to me back then that, uh, would have

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discredited this path. So I probably just actually got it wrong and maybe just admit this. Um, that

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one sucked because it just, it affected people's lives of employment and so on. Um, uh, but, um, but, you know, I'm wrong all the time. I've been wrong more times than most people will ever be wrong. I, I, I, because I do a lot of raps on it, on it. I make falsifiable statements because I want people to falsify them. I, I, I'm, I'm unafraid of a conversation. I'm unafraid of, I also just, I don't care that much about what people think about me, honestly. It's just like, it doesn't Why that with the weight of your decisions and the weight of your voice, when you speak 7,000 people

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follow you and with the frequency of your wrongness, that could be very costly. I think you've said before your job as a CEO is to like inject chaos into an organization. It's, I, I prefer to, uh, call it, uh, temperature these days. Um, just because it's like chaos probably is too negatively connotated. I think like, I mean, what is heat? Heat is atoms that jiggle, right? Um, uh, and with enough heat, these, these atoms, uh, I mean, they're usually coming from molecules and, uh, with enough heat, molecules refuse into something maybe worth having more. Um, that's what all of chemistry does. Um,

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so, uh, you know, like I think it's very hard to forge anything new at room temperature. So, like, I, I think great leaders must be exothermic and must be a heat source for the company. Um, uh, it's very different opinion than the custodial, uh, um, idea of leadership, which is also a valid position to take. Um, um, I do not need to inject heat into any area that has heat, right? Like, so, um, that's not needed. Like there's some areas that are so red hot because everyone's just like, so into just chasing innovation or like just incredible, uh, vision or whatever that like, just like, uh, my services are not needed here. Um, um, uh, and, um, I get to get to play a

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completely different role in these areas. Um, but those are usually not the ones I spend my time on because I spend my time on everything that's wrong. Like, again, why people should not overestimate how good these jobs are because you, you literally, I, I, I have a folder. So, um, uh, one of my concessions to potentially, I might maybe call it vanity. Uh, I don't know if it's quite vanity, but like, um, like maybe call it, uh, motivational, uh, plumbing is, uh, like, just like I have a part of my obsidian folders that are just like people that I respect who said things about things I built, uh, uh, that are, um, meaningful to me, little jolts of, uh, positivity and, uh,

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uh, um, mini accomplishments. Um, cause every once in a while, like, just like, especially you, you can, I can handle a couple of days of this, but like once it gets weeks, I only heard things that are going extraordinarily poorly or people making life decisions, which like have incredibly, I mean, just like, I mean, retire maybe, or like do more heaters on beach because I kind of figure somehow figure that's a good idea. Um, um, then, uh, you know, just like, and there's like deep consequences, like months of work to figure out how to, you know, create continuity of an area that otherwise was going great or whatever, or much worse. Um, any of these

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kind of things, um, um, you get a lot of, you know, people's health issues, like, you know, just like it's all affects companies, right? So, so sometimes you just get into these like really, really dark places and then it's just like a nice pick me up. So like, I'm not completely, um,

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detached emotionally from this. In fact, I'm actually enormously emotionally attached to Shopify. I think that's actually a common thing with founders too. So, um, you know, emotion is why I'm surprised when you said earlier, you don't look at the ticker. I never thought the company CEO I meet is like, No, it's not. The ticker has nothing to do with the company I'm building. The ticker is a, um, is guessing at the fair market value of a company. I work on a fair market value of a company. I, I, I like the ticker is just other people's game to make trades based on their assumptions of a future, uh, uh, compounding fair market value. When has the ticker been most wrong?

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At the beginning of COVID. We, um, I think the ticker went up. I want to say like, I don't even know, like a lot, uh, a hundred percent, something more. I like, and, um, we did not get a hundred percent smarter at that moment. This is as a founder, especially again, as a, someone who has lived with a ticker for 10, 11 years. This is really not surprising or confusing. I, I, um, have not looked at, uh, the ticker in April. Like I, I can, I know this for a fact. Um, um, so, um, it's probably much longer than that, but I definitely know I haven't looked in the last, uh, 23 days when we record this. Um, which by the way makes you a complete anomaly.

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Like I pretty much only interview public company CEOs now, and I've never met one like you. Again, it depends on where you are. It depends on what kind of company you're on. In some companies it also has more relevancy, right? Like, I mean, if you run a gold mine, like you, you, you have, you have no differentiation in the product. You might have differentiation in the

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amount of mining rights. Um, um, I talk with a gold mine guy. This is why this is my example here.

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I just thought it was funny. Um, for them, technology is actually, uh, investor relations. If, if you are the CEO, like your job is to, uh, you know, be everywhere and play golf with everyone. And, uh, you know, um, you know, just like, uh, be extremely charismatic because like, if you can somehow finagle your multiple to be slightly higher than the other gold mines, you just buy the other gold mines, right? Like, it's like, this is, of course, very quick. So you consolidate, like, it's, it's actually your product is not the gold. Your product is actually your IR. So, uh, investor

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relations. Um, so, um, yeah, like, I mean, that sounds like not an environment in which I would thrive. Sure. But, uh, um, uh, I know why you're not a venture capitalist, Toby. So it's funny. Uh, yeah, I, I, I think would be very bad, uh, um, uh, venture capitalists. I imagine. I,

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I think I tend to think I can onboard to anything. I, it wouldn't come natural to me. And, uh, therefore it would probably not what I would do. Um, and, uh, I'm just like too interested in making things. I, I, I'm, I'm, I'm just, I'm, I will work every day of my life. Toby, I'm going to do a quick fire round with you. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. What have you changed your mind on most in the last 12 months?

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One thing I'm wrestling with is I had to change my mind. I, I thought, um, straight out of school, uh, uh, engineers would have a really big advantage with no priors and like immediately sort of being AI native. And, uh, many of them are exceptional and are speed running their careers in ways. And there's like even younger people at universities. Like we had an intern with 13 from Waterloo, which is like still blows my mind. Um, and he was not even in his first semester and, um, his mom has to accompany him for classes, which is like, like, I love this. And, and by the way, he's very good. Like, it's just unbelievable. Um, so, um, you know,

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we, we are seeing like incredible, uh, like sort of career trajectory, uh, increases that I think are coming here. Um, but, um, I had to change my mind here because it, uh, because like initially I thought just having no priors would be better because we had to reinvent everything. Turns out the way, uh, I think authentic programming actually works. You give an initial problem, you give a task, it might come for a ticket afterwards. An engineer is like constantly talks with, um, uh, the AI to like steer it in the right direction. Um, all engineers are massively underestimating how important

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the steering is. It's, um, it's, it's, it's incredibly important. It's actually that it's, it's just the same as programming. It's just very high level. Um, and it turns out that, uh, just having, having done a lot, a lot of reps and having seen a lot of those just means senior engineers just steer these things in such a way that like they can accomplish incredible feats, uh, in baby a little time. So I don't know what that means exactly, but it's something I had to change my mind on. What role does not exist today that will be incredibly common in five years time? Um, there's something about this context engineering, which I had a hand in, uh, popularizing term of,

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um, uh, I think that will become more recognizably a, like a role in companies that will potentially subsume, um, a bunch of other more specialized roles right now. Honestly, uh, it, it turns out, I think people who've done like engineering management and management general are actually excellent AI programmers because they actually have been prompting intelligent agents for much longer than, uh, cloud code existed and, um, uh, they are just good at communicating. So that's, that's, that's, but no, I think increasingly the best, uh, work is to, uh, you know, prompt other people and

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AI's directly as sort of part of the same team. So I think, I think there's going to be, there's, there's going to be something that like maybe some ascension path job that you can get into from product, from, uh, uh, design or from engineering. Um, that's like something like a product builder role. That's like, it just involves like the coordination of intelligent actors, um, uh, to, to, to build products. It won't sound or look or be described as what I say, but like, uh, that's

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sort of direction how to hear. I mean, honestly, people who are good communicators are usually good thinkers because like good communication usually is like distillation of complex thoughts into unambiguous words. I mean, even when I say this, it just sounds like context engineering, doesn't it? Right? Like, um, um, so it's, I think that is becoming a very, very, very important role. Like if you, if you're building a large scale AI system, um, like we have one, which you think what river, which,

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um, lives in, uh, Slack, um, and, uh, does some ludicrous amount of Shopify's engineering. Now people just talk to it over Slack and, uh, it's called river because our Shopify is, has a, has a very big mono repo. Um, a mono repo is called world and rivers shape the world. So I think that's very poetic.

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Um, river named herself, like we first built her, then ask her what, uh, what name she wants. And she

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came up with that. Uh, and, uh, that's kind of crazy. So river sits on Slack, does a lot of Shopify's engineering with people steering her to public, um, Slack channels, which is awesome because then everyone learns from everyone else. What percent of code today at Shopify is AI generated? We just had Ali on. It's a fair deal over 50%. It's, it's, it's, it's converting to much higher numbers. I don't think we've updated, uh, public numbers there, but like it's, uh, it's, um, many of our best engineers have not written code this year. Um, ever since December, like December changed everything,

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like Opus changed everything. Does that excite you as someone who loves the craft? Oh, I love it. It's so wonderful because I, I just like, I love the craft and I can, the craft is not lost. Like also love mechanical watches, which make no sense, right? Like, but like, they're like, they're selling more than ever. Right. Because so like people always overestimate, again, this is what it, this is what growth is. Growth is not, um, subtraction of things or replacement. It is just adding. There's more in the world, right? Like, um, so we now have AI as well on, onto all the other wonderful products we can consume. So anyway, um, I can sit down and write

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code when I want to do this. Sometimes I do want to do this. Um, often it's part of a steering, right? Like I write the part of a code that concerns itself with the data structures and how the data is persisted on disk, which unfortunately that's sort of a German school of engineering, um, which is different from the computer science-y world of, uh, North America. Um, I think North America is wrong. Um, I think you should think about how data is persisted on, on, on disk above everything else in your databases or so, and then you, you, you, you can plan the system with this. I, I, I still follow

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this and, um, I, uh, so work on this either by describing or by literally just like making the sort of data access layer. Everything else can be vibe-coiled on top because I, I, I know the result will be excellent as long as the data structures are, um, uh, have, um, I used right. Um, and maybe that changes in the next couple of months. Um, but that's an area where I can definitely, uh, um, steer the AIs to get better results than, uh, they can do themselves, um, um, for a little while longer. And then afterwards I'll do something else. Uh, and maybe I'm going to do it just for kicking

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it old school. But like what, what my engineering ability allows me to do is reason about these systems, right? Like in a way that like I can be a partner and a coworker with AI because I can ask it very specific questions to go chase down. And I have those same questions all my life. In every meeting I'm like, you really wonder what the data structure is here? Um, uh, or like, um, how we persisting this or what we save or what we discard or what we re-derive in, uh, uh, data warehouse instead of actually just like writing it down in the first place. Um, um, uh, and, uh, you know, I have my laptop open and my, uh, uh, uh, uh, River, uh, open and then I can

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ask a question and I get a result. Um, because again, River can use the entire Mono report and just that goes chase down whatever I'm asking her. Sorry, random one. Would you encourage your children to go to university? So they seem uninterested right now. I think my oldest is probably gonna make a play for it. I definitely would not encourage them to go to university for being part of university. I would definitely encourage them to go get a degree, especially one that's hard to get into because then you're surrounded by people who also got into it. Um, I think, um, figure, figuring out how to get in the room with people who really, really want to be in the room

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with a topic of something you care about is actually the cheat code for any career. Um, would joining a stripe of the day not be better? So my bias would be that, uh, if you, if you can be of value to a small company, that that's the thing, right? Like you have to have the skills to actually be of value and the company agrees with you and sees that value, you should do it. But that's like, that's actually a wonderful test for both sides. I get an interview as a test, is it like both sides interview each other, right? Like that's what you should try. And then I think it's better than, uh, for alternative. Um, because again, it's much harder to get in a company

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both working for than it is to get into university. Do you believe in nepotism, Toby? Like, respectfully, if one of your kids apply for a startup job, the surname is relatively obvious. I remember my, my kids have the genes of my wife and me. They probably don't like, I think nepotism comes in if you, if someone needs a little bit of help and I think so, but like, they're fine. I just like, do your belief in nepotism? I think actually nepotism has a bad rep, frankly. I, I, I, I, it's annoying, but like, I'm starting to understand also, I mean, nepotism is probably just actually bad. I'm a, I'm a very big fan. This is probably, you can discern this from what I'm

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saying here of Thomas Sowell. Um, and, uh, Thomas Sowell just like, I mean, basically everything's ever said is, is incredibly smart. Um, um, amongst the many, uh, things worth quoting. I think in a book he wrote, when he was already in his eighties is that, um, uh, one of his, uh, regrets about society is that we have spent the last 50 years replacing things that work with things that sound good. So, um, you know, I, so, so, uh, ever since reading this, I'm like, don't have a knee jerk in reaction anymore against basically anything that I'm hearing about, but, uh, that sounds terrible because I, I just try

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to get to figuring out what is the redeeming value of nepotism? I think the answer is none. So, um, uh, merit double blind is, uh, the gold standard. Unfortunately, merit double blind is not the

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standard, right? Like it's like very, very rare. So I think nepotism might be better than some of the

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crazy shit people have doing to decide, um, uh, who, uh, who, who should be appointed into, especially in academia. Like in Canada, we have a big thing that's like, um, basically all the job postings for any kind of, uh, uh, like academic seats are now sort of full on intersectionality, uh, uh, like, uh, um, a fever dream, right? Like, um, find exactly a description that fits one person in terms of all the disadvantages they had in life. Um, and you know, which I mean, ours comes from a good place and maybe also ends up, uh, you know, having some, maybe it's an arbitrage sometimes because if, you know, actually there's all this like

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countervailing forces there that prevented them from getting the jobs they're auto. And then on day one, they, the person you do find is a complete banger in the job and like hats off, um, to you, uh, that you, you just like play the system perfectly in any other case, you just made a choice of prioritizing things that are not merit, right? Like, and which is again, goes against, uh, enlightenment values that, uh, literally everything that anyone likes about planet Earth, uh, in, in, in Western society and the foundation of all the countries that essentially have net, net immigration, um, uh, depending on in a lot of way. So, uh, and I think

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we should probably keep to some of us. Final one for you. What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given? Like mine is you're never wrong to do the right thing and the right thing is often the hard thing. I think the best advice I've been given, but I haven't been giving it, but like, it's, it's like sort of a rallying cry. I think that is just like, I, I kind of want to coalesce on that sentence just because it's memorable. And I think people can't hear it enough that you can just do things. It's just like at any point of time, the system is exists to try to get to good outcomes. If you know what good outcomes are, you can step out of system and give it a go.

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The cost is lower than ever and, um, action causes information. And again, one of the best things that can possibly happen is, uh, you figure out something that, um, there's actually a lot of reason why the system discourages it. Um, now the best limits to this, of course, um, there can't be, um, that this needs to be a completely victimless, uh, um, endeavor. Like you can't have someone suffering for you, trying a thing. Um, uh, that that's, that's, that's very important. Um, um, no, no, people can't have negative consequences of, of these kinds of things because then you're just like actually being an asshole, but because you're dividing people and

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prioritizing your own gain over other people and fundamentally you're engaging in a zero-sum thing and in zero-sum environments, you should probably not run experiments, but you should do, if you are in a zero-sum environment, you should figure out how to get a positive sum. And that's much more often possible than people imagine. Toby, I'm not sure I've ever had quite such a broad ranging discussion. I'm not sure if most of your

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interviews quite cover the future of climate, Trump and Canada's relationship, the future of developers and organizations, but I've so enjoyed this. So thank you. I mean, I mean, it's like the things I wrestle with. Like if you get me on a different time, I'll talk about different things. I just like, look again, what would be awesome if there's like some people were like really disagreed with everything I said, but like, like are still listening at this point, right? Like, um, because that's just, it's all I want. Like, it's all anyone wants. Like we just like, let's get back to like having conversations, allow people to be wrong.

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Like I'm wrong all the time. Like it doesn't matter to you. Like, so, um, I think that's, this is fine. Um, and, um, like we can lower the temperature. We can realize there's some priors in society. Some, some things were a lot bearing. We've placed some things which worked. I've made very, very few comments on what we ought to be doing. Um, I, I, I mostly talked about, um, creating the boundary, uh, conditions in which people can just do things, right? That's like the genius of the world thing, but genius of the world we inherited, but like our ancestors created ever since the enlightenment for us, uh, it's just that they created a, uh, like a, like a sandbox in which

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people can, um, uh, do things. They take responsibility for doing things. They are personally accountable. Um, they take personal accountability for the outcomes of, uh, like of this, um, they go to jail if they do something bad, they go, uh, but they are allowed to have property if they are like, if they're right. Um, the people, everyone who builds something is making an, just like an incredible Faustian bargain with society here in a world that discriminates against, um, builders in a way, um, just on account of their products having worked. Um, I own 6% of Shopify. That makes me incredibly wealthy.

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Yes. But it also means, uh, 94% of it are owned by other people, other people. That's all of those people made a lot of money with the company. And that's not even talking about the customers and all the people employed by the customers of, of ours. Like there's, uh, there's probably 10 million people working day to day, um, on Shopify. Like that is their, their job is to do the thing that Shopify, uh, asked them to do, like send out the products, like deal with customer relations, all these kind of things, built new, uh, uh, websites and so on. Like that was always there and Shopify has brought it

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into existence in, in actual ways that can be consumed. And like, we are not the only company, many do it and people vote, uh, right now, uh, and hopefully for a long time, uh, every month by paying the, uh, subscription that Shopify's instantiation of, of, of, of this idea that needed to, uh, be pursued is the one that, uh, um, um, is valuable to them. And you know, there's such a, there is a belief in society that when there's a good thing, there must be a counter reaction. Um, it's some kind of misapplication of a Newtonian laws. Um, and you know, some things are just good. Like some things are just like super fucking good. And the downsides might even be describable,

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but they just don't, don't pale in the face of all the goods that comes, you know? So. It's like we said earlier though, which is like the demonization of wealth. A lot of people you see in America thinking that to gain and to have a billionaire, they must have stolen from someone who doesn't have money. Yeah. Like it's, it's show me one. Like you can't get to a billion dollars by stealing, uh, like, like money. I mean, maybe you can, maybe you ask some instantiations, but then to talk about was specifically like the people who get their wealth by building companies have not stolen anything. They have created a product that people voted for. It's actually

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the most democratic thing that exists. It's vastly more democratic than any of the elections that we actually go doing bullets at. Um, people shape the world around them by the way they allocate their, um, uh, money to products. Every time you buy something from a local shop, you're voting for the, um, welfare and the future and the thriving of local shops in your area, not just the product that you purchase. And so, and, and there's nothing bad about that shopkeeper because they are putting themselves out there. They're working extremely hard. It's an unrational act to start a company.

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You're working extremely hard for yourself instead of working less hard for someone else. Um, but you're actually creating, uh, another thing and other people get to have employment there, uh, and have, have the jobs that, uh, work according to their lifestyle. And so it's so weird that they are like putting this on a, uh, in, in contempt. And again, I'm, I'm very, very pro constructive criticism, but like constructive criticism is itself something that someone builds, right? Like there are people who can, who create excellent constructive criticism and I learn a lot from them. I, I, I,

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I'm, I'm fortunate in that I get a lot of constructive criticism as even just as a public company CEO, like you have some people write incredible memos of externally that are really, really worth reading

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because they give you an perspective you didn't have. And that's, that's, that's them building up a picture in, uh, in the public mind about some, how to think about something. But there's also lazy and bad faith criticism or just like hot takes and this kind of stuff that is actually incredibly

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corrosive and should be had an incredible contempt by people. Um, uh, and, and, and we don't, but it's like how many times those, um, uh, do, do people who are saying something incredibly wrong, like look for the entire, all the things people have published during the COVID times, um, or even just like climate, uh, um, uh, you know, uh, panic, uh, pieces. Um, how many times have you actually posted revisions to, to, to this, right? Um, it's very rare. And so you, you realize it wasn't about truth, right? Otherwise they would do it. Um, uh, because that's the correct thing to do

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if, if, if, if, if you were wrong, the ice caps did not melt. In fact, um, uh, in, at the time frame,

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we are at the, we are in the years that they told us that my ice caps would be gone. Right. Um,

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And, and so just like, that doesn't mean there is no climate change, climate change is all the time. It's just like, um, it's not that, um, um, uh, it's inducing panic. Like you, you're not allowed, like I'm a very pro free speech. Free speech is a mechanism of self healing for everything else related to property and, uh, to, to, to, to, um, um, classical liberalism. Uh, and so it's, this is why it's worth protecting, but there is no absolute free speech, right? Like you can't scream fire in a, in a cinema, uh, in almost any place like that. You, you, you're going to the precinct afterwards, right? Like, um, but somehow you can do it in media or is that you can do it in,

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uh, in, in all sorts of like, if the timeframe is long and then it's fine. Do you worry about that moving forwards when the most common response on Twitter is,

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uh, Grok, is this true? No, I think this is my, I'm so bullish about the future. There was an effort

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misbalance, uh, mismatch in terms of bad faith acting. Like, it's like really easy to do. It's like one assertion, right? Like there's famously, it's like, uh, it's a Stalinist kind of thing. It's like for every man, there's, there's a combination of words that will undo him. Um, and so, um, it doesn't need to be true, but it just exists. Um, there's some accusation that is just plausible enough that, uh, the person disappears afterwards. Um, uh, um, especially,

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I mean, I think this was specifically a case in the Soviet Union. It's, it's, it's, it's, uh, it's always true when, uh, there's, uh, a lot of collectivism around, um, which is really just

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centralization of power of the state. Now the fact-checking is very, very hard. It's, it's an asynchronous warfare. It's a, it's, it's sort of information terrorism to take a very absurdist, uh, position on it. Um, like unproving that it's not true is a lot more work than, um, saying the thing, is, uh, uh, like is, and so you can ask, like, there's not that many bad faith actors. It's, it's actually a small number, but they can be incredibly prolific and, you know, seed all the kind of, uh, important, um, um, things. So, you know, like, I think AI is just gonna, AI is moving

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the power back to, uh, about good guys, I believe. Um, or not even like, that's actually wrong framing. It's not, there's no, no one, like there's no good and bad. It's like everyone's like good in their own local system and some people have a wrong system. And this is why we need conversations to, um, like arc them to the, uh, valuable ones in society. Um, and, uh, um, I mean, this is the nicest way to be, you can't actually believe that. Like,

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there are malicious bad actors who will use AI to exploit.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, sorry, I didn't say this. I am sorry, but they had a lot of interest in, no, no, you, you're completely right. There is also, um, especially, so if there's always a societal level and an individual level on an individual level, which is the one we document, right? Um, it's like, um, on an individual level, there's going to be so much shit happening, like voice cloning, like, uh, just like the hacking, uh, stuff, all software turns out to probably not be good enough in terms of security. That's going to be like a whole lot of bullshit we will have to deal with. Absolutely. Um, however, the same models can also write fixes for these kinds of things. In fact,

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the, um, like being able to apply as much, uh, intelligence in a form of artificial intelligence to the side of preventing fraud, I think that shift, like the bands would shift here. I think, I think we're actually going to get in a, in a much, much better way. Even like claim testing, like is the, is a statement true. It's a thing that can be done by a council of models,

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especially like Chinese trained model, Germany's trained, France trained model. Like let's get

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everyone's opinion on something and just give a different perspective and synthesis. Look, building the thing I just said, I can do by just going to one of those ghosty terminals, taking the transcript of what I, of just the words and, uh, like two, three more steers and I can put this on the internet and it will work. I will, I would have to pay for it because the tokens are expensive right now, but like suddenly we have a new institution, which is like, well, I'll see what everyone would think. What's the council saying about this claim and do some research. So we are, we're going in a world where I think less of airwaves will be dominated by the bored

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people who act in bad faith, because I think the other side has ability to push back. The Ed Claude, the Grok thing is sort of a primordial version of this, that's what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_01

I think more to just reinforce this example, if you just reinforce this example, if you just