Tobi Lütke is still captivated by internet commerce, 20 years later

27:37And that's a completely different level, but it's what I deeply appreciate. I massively admire it every single time any category gets to this quality of decision making and infrastructure. And the thing I enjoy on the software quality side that both Shopify and Stripe sell on, that's just a funny domain to pursue is peak load, where Stripe sells on just, you can put a lot of transactions through the system at once. And obviously Shopify, similarly, it feels to me that how you displace other e-commerce systems is if you are getting very spiky sales, you can put 1 ,000 requests per second through the system and that's totally fine.

28:19And most systems at a technical level can't do that. I guess I find it funny because I think we kind of grew up together kind of expanding the, you know, request per second thresholds. And you guys pushed us pretty well there. But I'm curious, like, where did this come from in e-commerce culture? Because, like, the marketer is saying, everyone will come to the website and click, you know, buy at the same time. The engineers are like, no, please do that. Stop encouraging that. But it's become like a real part of e-commerce culture, like the drops and things like that. Maybe you can fill me in on the drop history.

28:48So it's funny. You seem to have started this. Yeah, like, it's really funny. I'm just as amused by this as you are because it's like - No engineer would ever suggest this. Right, because it's a very, very strange thing, but it works. It's fantastic business built around it. The one that did it for us first, it was like something in 2010. It was a business called The Chive, which was like some, I mean, it's a website. It was like some community. Yeah. And I had like some t-shirt with Bill Murray on it. And that thing, every single time I went on sale, I took Shopify down. It was just like unbelievable.

29:27We actually couldn't, we didn't know the demand level because we just couldn't observe it. It was like upstream, the routers could not send enough traffic. And it's like, first of all, who's to try if we had to like catch up very quickly? And so it was one of those things where there was a very specific decision moment where we realized, I mean, this is obviously Shopify down is the worst possible thing. Like this is like the entire company exists to never make it so that anyone's down, no less the entire thing. So we were like, well, the traditional business thing is like, this is super expensive from reputation, from money, and we can't even in our business model ever make money back from the chive given what amount of resources we consume.

30:14So we clearly need to fire the customer and decided, no, absolutely not. We're using this as a gem and we're going to build the system in such a way that we can deal with this because this is exactly what good engineering looks like. and that was for tutors because I think the sort of pattern ended up really sticking it was like Supreme which really drove this further, it was streetwear world I remember Supreme and I remember Kylie Jenner there was like lip kits that's embedded in my memory from kind of 2013, 2014 stripe ish, that was definitely like that was a board level topic we had board level discussions And I know it's actually funny to know the diff.

30:58We probably sweat at exactly the same amounts on both sides because obviously we have an incredibly longstanding and I think at this point storied partnership. It's tremendously difficult to synthetically test all the pieces that go into commerce because it's just like so complex with so many things. There's so many APIs. There's so much we have to like the shipping to of course, payments and payments is like depending on the mix of bins, it's like a different profile of on Lorde, right? Kylie Jenner like the store had a lot more debit cards and that just kind of exercise different parts of infrastructure.

31:38And so anyway, these kind of things you find out. And on our side, we just like, yeah, like no sin was forgiven. Like every single sin was revealed and found us to be wanting very publicly. Is there anything particularly technically hard to scale? Well, I mean, so if you open a book on databases, like sort of page, probably chapter one, is like an example of how a transaction works. It's like, I mean, either moving money on a ledger or moving an item out of inventory into an order. It's a textbook definition of technology. Two textbook definitions in a row. So you fundamentally have to serialize at those points.

32:27This is like the log-contention moment. There's architectures which we employ that you can get around this. There's pools of products. We take out what is out of an integer into a striped thing. There's all sorts of things that do and then try to refill this as fast as possible. But the point is that you really deal with log contention, and log contention is difficult. It's very, very hard to scale if everyone at the same time wants to decrement an integer in the database, just actually. Then also the transaction involves having to go to interchange and move money. I was reading some histories of Oracle recently, but I think it's kind of interesting because, you know, proprietary databases were the leading databases.

33:11The LAMP stack only really took over in the 2000s, but in the 1990s, if you were building a thing, you actually needed to go buy your database, and there was these proprietary database wars in the 70s. And I was wondering, are there lessons for us for the current AI wars and model wars from the database history? But it was striking talking about the early feature wars of Oracle versus its competitors, and locking was such a big differentiator in those early versions. And row-level locking... Row-level locking was a big thing. But it came in like Oracle 6 or something. You would think it's like an Oracle 2 feature, but no, it took them a few revs to get there, and row-level locking was like the bee's knees.

33:53Yeah. And they released it. Yeah. I mean, and very glad they did. So, I mean, yeah. I mean, this is... Dotcom predates Shopify a little bit, but like, yeah, Dotcom tech company creation was like day one, you send a million dollars to Larry. to get your Oracle database. And I think, you know, day like 180, you went public or something. It's a very different time from today. Yes. I mean, I guess we're kind of getting back to that a little bit in AI where, you know, step one, send$300 billion to Oracle for a data center. You're a couple of days past 180 on your journey to becoming a public company, I have to say.

34:33Yes, yes. Anyway, moving on. I want to talk about agentic commerce. I had a really nice shopping experience recently where I wanted to buy an integrated travel adapter and power brick. And so I did some product research in ChatGPT and it was really nice. There was no ads getting in the way or anything like that. I actually found a product that I hadn't come across from Momax. It was really good. I think I was telling you. Yeah, I had to. Okay, yeah. And what's the verdict? It's very good. It's very good. Okay, yeah, we'll put a link. And it kind of linked me out and I purchased, obviously, super easy one click with ShopPay and everything like that.

35:11And it felt very futuristic to me, both in the product discovery and the completion side of things. But it feels like filling out web forms is not a value-add activity for people. Like when you travel, you probably don't directly book the hotel yourself on the website. You know, you have an assistant who does it or something like that because choosing the hotel might be desirable for you, but actually filling out the web form is not a value-add activity for you. And so what is your vision for how agentic commerce happens specifically? Because it seems relevant to your interests. It's relevant to my interests.

35:46I mean, it will be extremely valuable. And it will be something that will be done a lot and might even be like a majority of commerce on the internet. I don't know. But I think my role in this is going to be largely infrastructure providing.

36:07Our job is to keep all the millions of businesses of Shopify extremely current. And so what we want to do is make sure that everyone's plugged into the various chat systems and there's an MCP connected to every Shopify store and a global catalog that's really nicely presented. So we're building software specifically for the open AIs and the clouds and the complexities to make it really, really easy for these products to show up and reason about them and so on. Because we think it's really, really important that they can show up. So there's an infrastructure angle in it. But how is it being used?

36:47So I think the best way to predict the future in most cases is just, frankly, look at what rich people buy for themselves. Uber is a wonderful company. It's also extremely predictable because rich people had car service. So it's figuring out a way to scale that in such a way from cost basis so that everyone can use it. It's just like, yes, that works. So personal shoppers, right? These are the places where memory and understanding people and personalization are just like, pay so many dividends and are so clearly all too good. Like, it's like people have to make so much out of, like, data and advertising.

37:27You know, a personalized ad is a wonderful thing, right? Like, if a personal ad that tells, like, you know, I am scrolling past something that's monetizing the free application that I appreciate using. You should tell the EU this. Yes, well, I do, actually. and the fact that it's highly personalized to me means like at this moment where this platform monetizes because they're giving me a gift that I get to use. It's win-win. It's win-win. Using this moment also that is now not just like a fucking like Ford 150 truck or I don't even know if that's how you say that but like it's like I'm not a market for trucks, right?

38:04So I instead I see a travel adapter like what you should send me. You know like it was just like. I am your personal shopper in this case. But the funny thing is you send me the link, and if I would put that link in ChatGPT, which has lots of my history, and ask, is that the kind of product that I would appreciate? It would just return yes, right? Because it solves the problem in its entirety. It's like a travel adapter, which is likely for any country to any plug to any other, all sorts of stuff, good product, right? I want it. Okay, so we're getting down the road here. I mean, it feels like step one that's going to happen with agentic commerce is I feel like existing aggregators, if just aggregation is their raison d 'etre, then they're going to have a lot of questions that they need to answer.

38:54Because ChatGPT and the AI apps end up as a new aggregation point. And so it seems to very much benefit the tail. It benefits all the Shopify merchants, just like we had a new set of content creators emerge on YouTube that effectively compete with TV. They're both just entertainment. And the tail becomes much more powerful when you have over-the-top distribution through YouTube. Similarly, it feels like once you have over-the-top distribution through AI apps, it becomes... You have a much more powerful position as a tail merchant because Momax is a tiny brand, but they can just get recommended as the best product.

39:30So that's step one that I think happens. I think a slight modification I would just make to this. I don't think the tail part matters. I think merit matters. It's just like, it's kind of an important point because often when you talk a lot about commerce and products, at some point, just because of prior discussions, people are like, yeah, but aren't you just feeding consumerism? So this is sort of like the negative take, right? And again, consumerism is like a thing that is being thrown around, but where does it come from? It comes from people throwing away a lot of things that they probably shouldn't.

40:04But they throw away things because they hate the things that they have. These things don't work. They fall apart. They don't do the thing. They're like cheap, plasticky, this kind of thing. The thing that solves consumerism is quality products that you want to keep using. You want to be excited about this. and you want this travel adapter to last forever. And so you never have to think of, you literally never have to Google what plug is being used in Singapore. And you just know that the thing that you have with you can deal with everything to everything. So problem solved. And so I think that's an important modification on the point.

40:47Yeah, I guess implicit in my view is that there's good stuff in the tail, whereas the head has distributional advantages. and so it is more meritocratic to bubble more stuff up from the tail. That is, I think, the reconciliation of those two worldviews. Okay, so that's kind of step one that happens. I think you are getting to step two, which is it feels like there's a lot of changes potentially that can happen around personalization, about agents actually acting for you. And maybe one thing, I'm curious if you have thoughts on it. It just seems like a lot of search in e-commerce is really bad where it's keyword-based search still and you can't do things like, let me know if this becomes available in gray.

41:26Or what other products do you have like this? And you want some kind of embedding space that thinks about similarity between the products and no one can do this. So when are we getting better personalization? And search. I just want a really good search of the products that are out there. I am obsessing about this now. And we should have been... Tell me the secret Shopify romance. Shopify should have solved this earlier and hasn't. And I'm pretty mopey about this. You guys are okay. I think we will solve this now. So the thing is that it's really, really fascinating. I really deeply appreciate it as a field.

42:05It's so different. It has its own lore. Everything is interesting, is my fundamental opinion. And search has been a wonderful area to actually learn a lot more about the history now. And the fundamental thing is there's a generic bias in search and a text is king. And frankly, the people who worked in search are fundamentally more interested in searching for papers than for products. And so there's very few of the best people in search in a world of people who know most have actually ended up working specifically on product search, which is really, should be seen as its own completely different domain that just sort of looks like it, but it's really clearly deeper with lots and lots of complex features and so on.

42:55So, I got to build up over last year, a really, really, really, really great search team and exactly look at the embeddings and these kind of things. The amount of improvements that's just unexplored is just staggering. Shouldn't you do search across that? I find it interesting when Shopify does things broader than the Shopify universe. Because the Shop app can track packages not bought from Shopify merchants, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so shouldn't you do the search thing across the whole web and not just Shopify? No, should we? I think so. Because the thing that feels like the big opportunity to me is clustering was always so hard to do because all the features were developed manually.

43:41And so you had to go say that the dress is red and everything like that. And it feels like, have you ever used LLM as just a recommender engine where I like feeding in, these are all the books that I've read recently. Give me a narrative nonfiction book that someone who's read all these books might like. And it does extremely well, but you're kind of using the LLM to access its world model. And it feels like now you can have an interesting kind of product world model and access it. but people, like for the people using it, whether a merchant is on Shopify or not is probably an incidental detail they don't care about.

44:12Yeah, I totally agree. And you're talking about how, but like what is the really important thing? I just want, I want the LLM to be proactive and just tell me, hey, there's like, this outfit would look good on you and here's a preview, right? Like, and just like, here's a full cost and you want it, right? Like, it's the personal shopper outreach kind of component, which I think is just like really valuable. And this is not going to be like some kind of, like, you'll get this from everyone because it's really easy to put together. It's hard to get the data and the embeddings and the sort of understanding about, you know, like we have to figure, it's funny.

44:46The most important thing, again, in the AI space is also the unquantifiable. It's the vibes, people call it there. It seems like Mid Journey specifically is one company that managed to actually scale taste. It's a very distinct aesthetic in the images. Yeah, and maybe this is because they drove towards It's a particular aesthetic that they just sort of kind of felt they had ownership over, but it's one that's clearly appreciated. But David is also like deep founder mode type how he operates. Yeah, exactly. And so, I mean, when something outperforms, it's usually the product of a place that doesn't make decisions by consensus, right, as we know.

45:26So how do we, like, we need to figure out taste in this product sense. and we'll figure this out. Someone's going to figure it out. Maybe everyone's going to figure it out. Maybe it's already figured out in the neurons and we just don't give enough information for it to reason around the taste. And so putting like, I think it will be very, very, very good personal chopper. The thing that I think the aggregators still, to just like get back to your point on the aggregation side, there's many reasons why people buy things. I just like lots of things are inputs purchases. It's like the things next to the checkout counter in the supermarket.

46:06I don't think people are going to use chat GPT to buy mass bars or something, like candy or so. You don't do so online. Right, exactly. But is there an online impulse purchase that is not suited to happening in an AI app? Interesting question. Nothing comes to mind immediately. I mean, I guess online impulse purchases are like things where you're scrolling through Instagram and it's like, you know, all the COVID stuff. It's the sharpest knife ever developed. I wonder if it was truly... The umbrella that changes color in the rain. I wonder if it was truly input... I mean, they sort of feel like input purchase, but they tend to be...

46:41Like, very few people part with money unless they are like, holy shit, this is the thing I always wanted. Like, this is actually usually the longest... It's just tapping into demand that's been there for a long time. It's sometimes a little bit... The opinion... When you look at log files, you're going to get a very incorrect view of the world. It's very often the longest consideration phases. Like for years, I wanted a travel adapter that can deal with everything to everything. And the fact that it goes in a chat from you or in an Instagram ad, doesn't matter. I'll Insta purchase it at this point.

47:12Okay, you were just ready to do that. My other purchase I made recently that I really liked is I was going on a long day hike. And if you read the accident reports, it's often people day hiking who get into trouble because people who are going out on a multi-day hike, they have like their tent with them. Like they're prepared, you know what I mean? And then people go... It's all a problem with bicycle helmets too, right? Like same issue. It's a short journey, exactly, just to the store that gets people in trouble. Yeah, so day hikers, they get in trouble because they think they don't need any preparedness and then they end up out after dark and, you know, a rescue party and everything like that.

47:41And so it was like, it's called Bivvy, you know, like a little sleeping bag for emergency purposes. And it's made out of the reflective foil. And so, again, it's if you end up stuck, an emergency foil sleeping bag, just so you don't die of exposure, but it folds up to it's like that size, and so you can just stick it in a day pack, and now you are somewhat more prepared for the elements than you were before. I don't know, do you have a favorite recent purchase? I like the, I just really like these, I mean, someone going just like to ridiculously fervor and to just like almost, like products that just celebrate craftsmanship in a way, even in places where it's just like no one else does.

48:23It's like, I, weird example, but I take all these vitamins in the morning and I've bought these CVS vitamin pill cases at some point just for travel. And then I found on Shopify this Japanese perfectly CNC-built, unbelievably beautiful pill cases. It's just like the entire website is just like a love letter to precision engineered, like tolerances of sub-millimeters. What's it made of? Like metal, which is like absolutely, it feels like, it feels so, whatever. I'm really excited about it. Let's put something. Put a link in. Put a link in. I forgot the name, sadly. And now I gift those things because they're just beautiful.

49:11Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's cool.

49:15How's ShopPay doing? We referenced it there. ShopPay. ShopPay's awesome. It started out this life as a feature called Remember Me, which is literally what was on the checkbox. We also had a thing that was called Remember Me. That's like the original name for Link. No way. Yeah. That's trippy. That's very funny.

49:39It makes sense. They're kind of the same thing. Shop is much broader, but they're similar things. Actually, Shop feels more narrow. It's like it's on Comet specifically. You guys do all the shipping and tracking. Yeah, that's right. And so, yeah, so, yeah, Shop started, like, Shop then, I mean, Shop is Shopify's brand for buyers, right? Like, so, it's, you know, Shopify is what you use to be on Shop. And at least that's what we think about it. So, you know, there's a Shop app and, you know, Shop Pay. So, I mean, again, it started because it's a ridiculous thing that we asked anyone to fill out their address with their thumbs when you purchase something that is insane.

50:25This was meant to never be a thing because, you know, like in the, I don't know when they came up with HTTP, but there's the 402 error code, payment required, right? It's like built into HTTP standard and no one ever implemented it. And so moving money around was supposed to be built into the platform and wasn't. And then credit card forms were hilariously insecure over the normal web. And then we came up with HTTPS and made it reasonable, I suppose. And then it became good enough. There was all these efforts. Apple Pay. Actually, PayPal was around, but then sort of didn't do anything. So there are so many people doing this.

51:06and it's just like, okay, well, clearly this is going to be solved soon, but might as well just put a remember me thing in there so we can solve this now as almost a polyfill for the future of the internet. And then no one did. I mean, very few people did, and it just sort of didn't happen. And now ShopPay is like incredible. Super glad to have it. It's like the most converting thing we've ever done. Yeah, what seems interesting to me about it is I think it's a significant part. It's not the only part, but it's a significant part of the inversion where, again, now the small stores are significantly better off than the large stores online, and that's just a striking...

51:42It's striking, and it's a 16 % conversion increase by it being robbed. So it's a remarkable product now, because, again, it's a power of branding. It's purple always, and people learn to trust it and associate it with a store that's actually recent and cared for and doesn't, you know, now they don't have to, before they get to checkout, they know they will not have to type in the address with their phones, like some kind of heathen from the 90s. Yes. Just like... You mentioned personalized advertising and being a big fan of it. It seems to me that there is a real symbiotic relationship between Instagram, where people are kind of scrolling in an aesthetic mood, looking at nice things, and then Shopify stores, where they need customers, and so especially during the pandemic there was this huge growth of direct-to-consumer brands who really cracked the Instagram CAC to LTV math and they were able to grow in a big way there.

52:44Then of course the Apple ATT changes happened where for a brief period it got harder. It seems like Meta has mostly solved that but anyway, I'm just curious what's the current state of like is this worldview I have true that there's a lot of Shopify merchants that have been able to really scale up thanks to personalized direct advertising? Yeah, 100%. It's a main growth channel is advertising on the platform. The Meta platform specifically is just so incredible for this. I think the Meta Shopify LAO has created more businesses than any government policy in history. So it's like, I mean, if you just compare to television and consumer packaged goods before, the television channel required broadcast.

53:34And so the only things you could really advertise were like mass market high margin products. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For the advertising. Washing powder and all this kind of stuff. Exactly. So it's like laundry detergent and toothpaste. Yeah. And so the Instagram, Shopify is a precise inversion of this. as highly meritorious products. It's the first time you can advertise niche products. Exactly. And the niche products are actually doing better. That's the crazy thing. Advertising directly snowboards is impossible there. Can't take out a billboard for snowboards. The brand halo of Burton means you can't compete with that.

54:11There's intersections. Snowboards only for powder snow on the U.S., West Coast, and in certain environments. This is not the best example. Usually there's three different intersections of something. And it goes back to, Kevin Kelly wrote about this in the early 2000s. He wrote an essay of a thousand true fans, and the internet is about finding your thousand true fans and everything else will happen. And restoring that idea or bringing this idea into retail has done a lot of good things, right? It just created better products. It created this world uses. And meta allowing you to discover one of those people who has a potential to be one of those thousand true fans is an incredibly powerful thing that just, again, led to enormous good and employment and all these kind of things.

55:06So it's a very, very powerful combination. There's all sorts of other ways how people grow, but this is a very, very large part of everyone's strategy. You're saying this enables 4K for commerce. There's this higher resolution, more specialization, as opposed to the blurry generic products. Yeah, exactly. Find the people who are really interested in who appreciate the products. I like that. How is the stablecoin rollout going on Shopify? So we're obviously doing lots of stablecoin stuff with lots of people, including you guys. But I feel like you guys are one of the biggest bets on stablecoin pay-ins.

55:44Everyone should just be able to use stablecoins as a payment method. that we've seen. And so, how's that going? I'm obviously just a huge fan of the concept of stablecoins. I love the work you're doing there and congrats on the launch of Turbo. And the internet just needs its own currencies. I think it's important. At least it needs its own infrastructure to move things by internet speeds. And I'm excited for it because, I mean, I think a valid criticism of crypto in the past, as exciting as it is, has been that the utilitarian difference between a real US dollar and a US dollar crypto coin is like that the US dollar crypto coin is mostly like, it's sort of like gift certificates to scams.

56:33It's like, there's not that many things you can actually purchase with it that are of high utility value. It's like, obviously, this is, I think, why - The economy was too circular. Exactly. Most of it was like, you purchase other coins. that then you might have, I mean, hopefully you diamond handed into some kind of upswing, but it's like that's not usually what happened. And I think that's valid criticism. I think the most important thing to happen there is we need to expand what can be purchased with stable coins to the things people want to purchase, like outside of just sort of insular crypto, fintech.

57:11But yeah, we are working hard on getting all Shopify stores to just take stable coins. What does the merchant response mean? Very positive. Again, because through the work that Bridge is doing, we can settle into US dollars directly. So the merchants, they've just gained a new ability without having to make a strategic choice to go into a new industry. Like if there's demand for being able to spend stable coins and they can now sell to everyone who wants to particularly do that. So it's totally transparent and it's a beautiful thing, amortizing R &D over millions of businesses with us centrally because we can just build up the system.

57:54And everyone gets benefit of it. And so obviously it's in testing. The conversion rates have to not be negatively affected obviously by its presence. So we have to make absolutely sure this is the case and lots of overbounds of caution on every Royal Rekord from the checkout because it's the busiest checkout on the internet, basically. So we might not want to reduce conversion rates ever. I think it'll also be interesting to watch the consumer training aspect of it, where like QR code is always my example of this, where the tech has existed since the 90s, But it was really only during the pandemic when we installed the software in people's brains to understand how QR codes work.

58:35But there was a moment, and now they're kind of everywhere for everything. And obviously, they're in Asia before they're in the US and everything like that. I think there'll be something similar with stablecoins where they'll be offered at the point of checkout way before people become super familiar with them. But we're probably only a small number of years away from some mass market familiarity. I think it's going to be very, very natural for people, but also in a way that they just not think about it. It's like it's a normal thing. It's like it doesn't matter. It's going to be so well tooled up to bridge between these things that it's using crypto rails while using the internet.

59:15And until you need it out of the internet, you don't have to bridge anything. Yes, yes. You've referenced a few times the kind of stuff Stripe and Shopify are doing together. And, you know, we've caught up at various points and even talked at the meta level about the Stripe-Shopify relationship where there's some, I don't know, is it like Apple TSMC or something there where it's like deep intertwined building in a stable way, but also kind of expanding over time. And no confusion as to who's ultimately the one building the end product versus who's kind of providing some of the underlying infrastructure.

59:50But I'm curious what you think has worked well because, yeah, a lot of corporate relationships do not last. I mean, I guess if you dated 2012, which I think is like maybe 2011, 2012, like 13 years, it's certainly more tenured than some. Yeah. And I think it's almost more impressive when you think about it as market cap expansion. I mean, we were both a very small company. People get greedy, yeah. Well, also, I mean, we have had a highly functioning, excellent symbiotic partnership. And probably there's like, I mean, how many more digits on the market cap of both companies? Like we've expanded many, many, many times here, many out of magnitude.

1:00:31And that's pretty rare because like, again, partnerships, especially in tech, tech is extraordinarily bad at partnerships. and I mean it's always treated as a prisoner's dilemma that at some point someone in the company realizes defecting gives you five points on the map and that sounds really really good with the short term focus. So everyone mistrusts each other and it's fairly rare and I think it's cool that we pulled it off and I appreciate the partnership it's been really really fantastic being able to just focus on my space instead of having to duplicate things that Stripe would always have done better.

1:01:14I think a lot about main quests and side quests. And I have such good, I guess, founder market fit with commerce. I just like, I really care about this. And I really, I have, I can spend my entire, like it's one, Karl Popper calls it finding, like the best gift in life is finding a beautiful problem that you can never solve. And even if you accidentally solve it, if you're so unfortunate to solve it, hopefully it has plenty of enlightened problem children that you can then tackle. And so finding one of those is good and not having to meander into some complete adjacency to support it is actually wonderful.

1:01:56Yeah. I think there's also something about when you talk about this idea of focus, I think second acts are kind of a bit over-valorized in Silicon Valley somehow, where everyone talks about, oh, we want to do like a new AWS is kind of the coolest thing ever where you do a second thing that is completely unrelated to the first thing versus NVIDIA is the largest company in the world. And they just started making GPUs in the 90s and it turns out a lot of people want GPUs. And I mean, they did obviously lots of incremental expansion from there, like calling them GPUs is doing a disservice, but it's in a very hill-climbing expansion way.

1:02:32They went vertical. I think it said horizontal. Business folks tell you to go horizontal because, again, the chief competency of most businesses ended up being having a stopwatch. It was a management system world, but we are actually in a different world now. This is commoditized. It's easy to access, and probably GPT-5 is better at it than most managers. It's now actually like, well, what problem do you understand better than what's in the training tokens for GPT-5? and what do care more, which is a human capacity specifically. And so Jensen just cared more about GPUs and saw more potential in that.

1:03:12Isn't there a bit of MBA-ism here too, where if one was trying to, when Shopify was 1 ,000 times smaller, raise money for Shopify, it would just sound ludicrous to say, we're just going to do e-commerce software, and it turns out that's a really big market, and here's our current projection, and here's when it's 1 ,000 times larger. It's like, get out of here, come on. Whereas if you say, oh, we'll expand to do this, and we'll expand to do that, we'll build a CRM or whatever, it's easier to justify expanding into other TAMs. I got rejected from plenty of VCs in 2008 when I went around. And some of them said they would invest, and then it was usually terrible terms of like ratchets or multiple.

1:03:48And I had to move a company to Silicon Valley, which, again, I would have if it wouldn't have taught me to do it. Once you tell me to do something, I don't want it anymore. but anyway I caught up with many of the partners later in one case a really interesting conversation he asked me what did we miss back then and I was just like well the reason why you didn't invest is like you said there's 40 ,000 online stores in the world right now in 2008 and well you can get half of them but that's not actually that big of a business and what we miss is like well Shopify itself was the solution to that problem.

1:04:28The reason why no one was building online stores is because the friction was so high. And so it's a little bit of that, right? Like, yes, it's not an interesting business plan. It doesn't, the pitch isn't very good. Specifically coming from me. This, but more. Yeah, yeah. Coming from me is probably especially bad. But it's also kind of... Man, the best products in the world come from people really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really. deep on something. In the programming world, we are using Cursor, which is basically VS Code. VS Code is Eric Gamma's fourth editor. He spent his entire life making these things.

1:05:07Like the craftsmanship. Yeah. It's like he wrote the design patterns book that many of us read at some point, literally about programming text editors. Sometimes you just need to dedicate a career to a field and get deeper into it than anyone else and celebrate craftsmanship along the way and kind of try to build the best thing. Yeah. But again, it's hard for people to give credit to that idea and a model. People are not capable of being sufficiently optimistic about a business that really works. It just blows through all their projections. Yeah. The question is also, we've seen the story so many times that some step function changes.

1:05:48At some point, maybe the Shopping and all these kind of things with Shopify, it somehow became something very different than what you would have visualized. And this is in no area more true than in the NVIDIA case. These CUDA cores, the Tensor cores, were around. They were on these cards which everyone put. They were part of the bomb. And very little use by any of the engine. Like, CarMax's new engine probably used them for something useful. But they were just there. And CUDA was not even, like, that was around for 10 years before AlexNet got trained. Yeah. Like, it's an incredible vision to just, like, doggedly pursue this because, you know, in the future there will be value if you do this.

1:06:33And it makes you wonder, I think that's probably true for almost every space. I think every space driven to that level could become so big. Isn't there something here where more founders should be willing to follow their nose of what's just a good product? Because, again, I think that what can happen as companies scale is founders get successful by building good product. And then they hire a bunch of people and finance people and run the planning process and everything like that. And it's like, OK, well, what's the revenue projection for this and things like that? Whereas actually, when we built Stripe Atlas for incorporation, there was no amazing projections behind that, that one day this would be a giant business.

1:07:18It's not a giant business for us by any kind of revenue metric, but we think it's very valuable because people start their business on Stripe and we help them with something foundational, like incorporating the company and getting it off the ground. And it all kind of ties together in this very immeasurable, nebulous way. And kind of like you're saying with CUDA, I presume that it's hard to justify at that moment in time, but it seems like the right technical decision. And there's something maybe where founders should be a bit more willing to follow their noses on what is right for the product and right for the user.

1:07:48And it'll all come out in the wash in years down the line. Yeah, I'm a great believer that if you build things that are of value, then people will figure that out it's like it's very very hard to keep people away from things that make um their lives significantly easier better or more joyful uh and um i mean i i get the front row seat to this on my platform right like it's crazy how fast some success stories one of my favorite things we we do is we um started making these really uh sort of nice um um awards for people when they do hit certain sales milestones. And some of those, when I go travel, I check out who's just got them and just sometimes deliver them.

1:08:34And Harley does this much more than me. And it's such a cool thing to talk with them. And man, some of these businesses that hit 100 ,000 or million sales are like 18 months old. It's just cracked the code or something. and with the most, you know, talk of a thousand true fans. It's like millions. It's like an army created because people just were starved for this like authentic, like unabashed, like something needed to be done. Something was wrong in the world. It involved a product not existing and that product not existing was such a bother to someone that they made it their mission to create it and then they went through trials and tribulations And usually, they often document in the journey, taking, like, allowing other people to ride shotgun to sort of over time try on their vision of the world, which again, is not to change the world, but it's to add the thing that was missing.

1:09:36It just like, it makes things 1 % better, not like, sort of, everything's new. And they just agree with that, and they love authenticity of it. They love that someone that they know have a little bit of a relationship with, kind of pursued this thing that they think was worth doing. And then the product comes out and they tell everyone and then more people buy it. And it's just like there's so much good that comes out of this. And that was all value which was there for everyone to take. Every product that sells well was a discovery. It was sort of invented but also kind of discovered. But it's that person that did it and they deserve the chronological value that comes to them.

1:10:18Everything about It's the best part of capitalism all rolled up for everyone to inspect and review. And we get to have a front row seat from data and front row seat sometimes with giving these sort of celebration artifacts. And anyway, so this is always the greatest thing. It's just like the people who are using the platforms are actually really inspiring people. Well, I feel like it must be particularly satisfying for you because there's all these edge case failure modes of capitalism of rent extraction or oligopoly or regulatory capture or everything like that. And you just have a front row seat to the pure competitive differentiation, people succeeding on the merits.

1:10:59And it's kind of a very pure form. I feel like you have that too. And it's like, we should write postcards to a rest of it. But there's something really to this, like, you know, just don't, this real world thing, right? Like, it's like the one everyone says your product doesn't, wouldn't work in, like, it sounds so dystopian. It's like, it does really sound quite dystopian. Like, I don't want to have anything to do with it. I just much rather, like, hey, just build this whatever world, whatever that is, and invite everyone over. And if it's good and works, then people will join. It's actually that simple.

1:11:41And I think it's better to live in a world with people going direct, people communicating, people being real people. There's very, very rarely a PR department. There's probably a marketing strategy, but the marketing strategy works based on just new ideas and organically. And there's very few people being highly enabled building products that they care about. We had Mackenzie from Ambrook on here, which is SaaS for financial infrastructure for farms. But she was saying one of the big trends in agriculture right now is direct-to-consumer stuff, where you're actually transacting directly with your farmer.

1:12:19I'm sure a lot of them are running on Shopify as well. What have you learned on the Coinbase board? I never had another job, really. My apprenticeship and mostly learned what not to do as a company. and then sort of had the opportunity to start Shopify, just trying literally the opposite. And that's basically the operating system I've been running on. It's been amazingly successful. So thank you, Siemens. But it's so hard, especially building it in Canada, like in Ottawa and Toronto. It's funny, I always had this effect of it came to a value a lot when I had time and money. I had all these meetings and then talked with people and they described to me how real companies do these things.

1:12:58And then I went home and tried to implement it. And then only years later, they realized very few of the companies describing what they're doing actually did the things that they told me. Everyone gave me sort of an idealized highlight reel, and I compared that to my average. And then I implemented how I think you could do a better job on the stuff that they described and sometimes ended up with good things. And I was very, very happy with this. And then now, obviously, I'm describing when this goes really right. And just as often, this went really wrong. So, they are just like, Shopify ended up being this sort of lopsided thing that is probably ludicrously over-engineered but advanced at certain things, and then incredibly primitive at things that no one fails usually.

1:13:44Because in a more liquid labor market where more people build companies, the information is just more readily available. What was awesome was joining Coinbase as a board because it's like, here's another founder-run company, by an incredible entrepreneur that's put together, again, not by committee, but by a clear desire to build an important company and important institution. And just holding it up and seeing what they were incredibly strong at compared to... It gave me... I learned so much about my own company and I could... Have a reference point. Have a reference point. Right? So it's quite a gift.

1:14:25I don't know when it's the right time for a successful entrepreneur to join another company. I wouldn't do it too early, but it eventually becomes quite valuable. And so Coinbase is such a remarkable company. You had Brian on. He's such an incredible entrepreneur. Very first principles. And that was a company under brutal attack by regulators in a way that very few companies of all time have ever faced. that's like, they went through like, the government wanted them dead, and pretty much said so, right? So I learned so much about the posture that Brian took to it. He will never get enough credit for the courage and like the intestinal fortitude he's shown there, because many of the details are internal to the company and the board, but like, God damn it, he's like good.

1:15:16Like, I do not think I could have navigated my company through a similar barrage. Yeah, Brian strikes me as someone who is very hard to manage up to. You know, that's always the risk for CEOs, that people are trying to, you know, construct some Potemkin village. And, you know, he was describing the policy work that they were doing. And he was saying, you know, well, you know, the company's meant to be the good cop and the trade group will be the bad cop. And then he's being the trade group. And it's like, wait, these are also the good cops. And so he was saying, OK, here's our new bad cop plan.

1:15:46But again, he was just kind of refusing to go along with the things that everyone was serving up to him as the plan. I think great entrepreneurs are ungovernable. And it's the problems often arise when people somehow manage to figure out how to. I think studying failed companies is actually often more useful than you agree. What you find invariably is that the company knew exactly the stuff that was the problem. It's just like somehow CEOs got disconnected from that. Yeah, it's not so much that I want to study failures. It's that I really want to avoid making the same mistakes that other people have well-intentionally made and like found, oh yeah, no, that's a blind canyon up there.

1:16:31We should at least be able to make new exciting mistakes. Rob, the guy here who runs CorpDev, he's very experienced in it and he's done hundreds of acquisitions previously, But it makes him way better as a corp dev lever because it turns out that there's lots of ways for deals to go sideways. And if you just have seen a lot of them before, you can keep tabs on them and be finding ways to steer away from them and things like that. And I think just avoiding the well-trodden mistakes, and if you're going to make mistakes, at least make new mistakes that haven't been discovered yet, is kind of underrated as a strategy.

1:17:04It's totally underrated but completely vital because you die to a thousand paper cuts as a company. So you kind of have to first avoid it becoming a thousand, and then second, you will make mistakes, make them original so there's alpha in it, so that you accrue some additional knowledge that now is unique to you. How do you like to be ungovernable? How do you like to avoid being managed up to? You probably can't share all your secrets, because part of them are part of the special stuff. I just think going direct a lot inside of a company, too. It's just like, I mean, this... The tourney of the org chart, and information flowing up, being polished at each step.

1:17:37Yeah, I'm just like, I don't think, like up and down is sort of not the right mental model. It's in and out. It's good. It's like certain decisions are best made at the outskirts of a company, closest to the customers. But I'm a big believer in many decisions have to be brought inwards as well. Like this is why product reviews are like very centralized. It's like a way of efficiently moving information completely independent of org charts. I'm a fan of functionally organized companies. It's the trade-offs, it's like it is significantly harder for executives. It's very unpopular for executives because obviously they just don't own like entire shebang that they can make all decisions in and that requires a lot more collaboration which feels wrong and feels slow.

1:18:24But you make vastly better products in functional organizations, at least for Shopify. and you know that helps I just like know a lot about the company like being so many details like I try to be like in AI stuff first so that I can you know I always see it as a gift when something new happens because especially like I'm very good at quickly figuring out stuff and then I sit there with knowledge and I can now like look at okay who else gets there fast and those are my future leaders like that's a very implicit test. Oh, that's interesting. You're kind of testing some adaptability or something like that.

1:19:06Yeah, like the biggest difference between people inside of any company or just like in general in industry is like some people fall in love with solutions, some people fall in love with problems. And I just like fundamentally am a person who appreciates people who fall in love with problems. They're hard to distinguish during fairly stable times, right? Like it's very hard to know who is who because, well, if you don't change anything, they look exactly the same. I like inducing change in general to suss this out. I don't know. How do you induce change? That sounds euphemistic. I don't know, just like literally like that, like do stuff.

1:19:38I think reorgs are sort of a standard way. All reorgs work because reorg is valuable. It doesn't matter what your organization structure is afterwards. The benefit, well, I mean does, but like there's some benefits to any organization structure. It shakes things out of the stasis. Well, and the advantages of any organization structure occur immediately. The disadvantages only appear over time. So if you change a lot, you do multiple things. You're also like, I think heightening your misalignment with people you don't want in a company is an enormously important thing. So like if you re-work a lot, you end up, the people that have stepped out who don't like that, which is a perfect, like, it's probably the same position to take even.

1:20:21If a company thrives under a lot of change and is exposing itself to a lot of change, then it's important that you are clear about that. I think you try to make your company as different from every other company as possible, which is actually, I think, the opposite of what most companies, most CEOs optimize for. And probably most professional management. Right. I think a lot of people want to make their company as similar as possible to all other companies. But I think that's, I mean, to me, that's a lack of diversity, right? There should be diversity in companies because there is diversity in people and people need to find a product.

1:20:53In what ways is Shopify most different to other companies? I mean, this sort of, you know, the internal tool culture is maybe an example of this. It's quite clearly R &D run in a way that quite a few companies are, but they don't acknowledge, they're obscured. We actually say it and celebrate it and say, we actually are on our opinion at this point that everyone should be able to code, at least sort of since Vype coding is around. This has gone from, you know, have to spend all of your teenage years in a dark room cultivating a rare skill to spending a couple of weekends with YouTube. Like, let's go.

1:21:29This is not a problem anymore. Speaking of teenage years, I'm always very interested in the on-ramp to entrepreneurship and the on-ramps to programming. And I'm curious, some people decry that programming has gotten harder to on-ramp into where, you know, the first stuff I built was like janky PHP webpages. But obviously, PHP is actually very nice because, you know, you're just writing code directly in the web page and you refresh it. that's the execution environment. And now... It's a high watermark of our industry. And so have we made programming too hard to get into? Yes, totally. Okay. To tell my wonderful board member, David Heinemar Hansen, like the high watermark of the world of programming, at least web programming, was clearly when the FTP PHP file up and it was instantaneously deployed.

1:22:16How long does it take code to deploy these days? This is like all choices now, right? I mean, we've made some choices which are worth making. Maybe we'll do it again. But there was an immediacy and a visceralness to programming and that clearly has been lost. So lots of things have gotten incredibly amazing. And I always said, like we used to say that after two years, it's like someone puts them into code base and no one changes anything. We figured out how to avoid those horrors. I think we have a very mature discipline. We've always, as programmers, I'm an engineer too, We've always had an identity crisis.

1:22:55We always wanted to be someone else. We have significant science envy. We even attempt to call it computer science. There are some people who do computer science in the machine learning world. It's a real thing, but clearly it's a vocational art. It's not most computer science degrees. Yeah, and this is also how we eliminated things like aesthetics and beauty and stuff from our code bases. So I like what I'm talking about. There are beautiful code bases. There's beautiful code. It's like this code that like tells a story and clearly communicates what it's there for to everyone who reads it, ideally, and is an artwork of sorts.

1:23:33And so, yes, I think we have progressed. I think we have also advanced, but I think we don't have a clear vision to drive simplicity. And I think I personally really deeply appreciate and have always prioritized hiring electrical engineers into programming roles. Just because they just have a better idea for the costs of inefficiency. Waste, really. You know, like you put too many chips on a thing. It's too expensive to manufacture. You will just never sell it. It's not a good product. Where the zero marginal cost of copying software just means all synths are forgiven. and in fact, of course, still runs and does a thing.

1:24:15You really have to fit the whole system in your head as an electrical engineer. That's right. And so anyway, so I think we're immature. We don't know what great is. We leave a lot of this up to people and therefore the outcomes are so different depending on who is on the project. I mean, again, we're all getting more conscientious about it. I think we are in a counterswing to the sort of horrors of architecture, astronauts that have caused a lot of damage to our industry over the last, especially in the 2010s. So we are getting in a better spot. And then I don't know what AI it was. But the interesting thing is, I don't even think it's going to end up mattering because AI is going to solve all technical debt.

1:24:58So it's like maybe all it's in-sign for you. Same question about on-ramps to entrepreneurship. As a kid, you were selling things to your classmates. And what I observe is a lot of entrepreneurs have the same origin stories where they were entrepreneurial early, either something like that where they had some business in school, a super common one as Patrick did web development. And when you're a kid, getting paid thousands of euros to build a website is like infinite money. I didn't know such large amounts of money exist. And obviously, to a small business, they're like, wow, I'm totally taking advantage of this kid for a mere few thousand euros.

1:25:35and then another common one seems to be drop shipping arbitrage you know this whole thing of like buying on AliExpress and selling on eBay or something like that but you maybe have a window into this with Shopify or something do you have a sense of what the right like if a 13, 14 year old is listening to this and interested in making money what are the areas where you think are kind of good to pursue today? Yeah I think these reps are the important thing I've made the mechanisms change and there's like entrepreneurship clubs are really like using Shopify a lot I love that. And this is one of those areas I would love to go much deeper on, just because it's such a...

1:26:12It would be so fun to really, really build directly for them. The super important thing is just go through life, understanding that everything around you is built. You wrote one of my favorite tweets of all time, probably, actually, maybe a high water mark on X on this topic. The World's Museum of Passion Projects. That's right. And I love that because if you can teach that to students, it's worth more than most of the entire curriculums of subjects. And so I think the commonality behind entrepreneurs is that they early in life, they somehow something happened that told them that the world is dynamic and it changes.

1:26:53Some of us, I had the enormous advantage of living exactly sort of at the time when we went to computers to no computers, like, in homes. And, like, I had one early and lots of my neighbors didn't. So I had the counterfactual there of being just absolutely fascinated with them. And then networks came in my teens, the internet. So I had a front row seat to a world, like, the world around me in this small sleepy town in Germany was irreconcilable with what was becoming possible. Like it was so clear that so much would change. And so I think that dissuade me of sleepwalking through the world. It just made me like this, like, okay, like, that's fun.

1:27:36Like I'm sitting on a piece of information that everyone around me doesn't believe yet, but it's clearly true and I'm going to bet on. And so I'm going to take reps looking at things around me and figuring out how they could be done better. And that process is, I think, the most valuable process to cultivate as a young adult or teenager. So the meta process is more important than the actual domain you choose. I agree. Yeah, absolutely. I think if you spot opportunities, see what you can do with it. It's a really important thing. I think we overemphasize those stories and de-emphasize the process that causes this.

1:28:15It's building the habit of looking at things and thinking about, A, do I know how to make a better version of this, which you should do anyway? And then we definitely underestimate and under-celebrate and under-lineize. The Beatles Hamburg days. And acting on this impulse would mean I'm going to spend the next five years of my life doing this, and I'm willing to pay what that costs. And for you, is that just doing a lot of programming as a teenager? Programming is how I just made things different. And, you know, like I went to these classical language schools. I was bad at Latin. We started with Latin.

1:28:56I only got English in like an eighth grade, hence my accent. But your Latin accent is excellent. Yeah, I imagine. Well, no, because no one knows how that actually sounds. And it's definitely not German. So everyone just like, it goes off. Yeah. Anyway, I just hated doing the vocabulary tests. I was bad at it. So at some point I wrote software for teaching myself, basically similar to, I suppose, what's called spaced repetition now. But like, it's just like, and it's like, there's a little basic shell script, right? Like, and it's stupid, but like something about making this and then using it made it interesting enough that I did it.

1:29:31And so like, it's a very clear moment where like, and from, I think I got a D on a test, which was like, it's starting to be problematic. I just like A's for the rest of my life, right? Like, it's just like, that is a crazy experience, right? Like, this is a thing that didn't exist, that fits me personally. Maybe my first internal tool. So, yeah, it changes you. Exactly. It made you passionate about building your own software. Yes. You mentioned spaced repetition. The other interesting educational topic du jour is mastery learning in the Bloom Two Sigma effect. How do you put that into practice, do you, with your own kids?

1:30:03Yeah, so my kids. I have three boys, 15, 13, 11. And they go to a school, a boys' school, which we are quite fond of. And I mean, my kids, they're quite nerdy. So like, it's just like... I met them, yeah. Yeah, so I love them to bits. I can't wait to go home. It's such a fun time. Everyone should have kids. And the particular mechanisms by... I don't know. It's like the most important principle of... Like, parity principle I have is everything's interesting. This is a sentence you will hear a lot in our household. that's what kids say it. No one is allowed to say they're bad at something. They're only ever allowed to say they are not good at something yet.

1:30:48So that's basically the entire set of principles. We're not good at gross margins yet. Exactly, yes. We choose not, yes. You know, and making a joke is funny too, right? Like, it's just like, I want them to have those things in their priors because, like, it's really easy to say something is annoying, but, like, it's much, much harder to figure out what you would have to do to make it interesting for yourself. And I think there just isn't anything that is not actually interesting. You spend a long time in banking. It doesn't sound terribly interesting to me initially, but I've learned enough about it that I've read books about double-entry accounting and the history thereof.

1:31:26And it's just absolutely fascinating. Did we recommend the Calamira's book to you, Fragile by Design, which is a history of various countries' banking system? I'm literally just reading it. Oh, you are? Okay. The Canada chapter is particularly good. It's like a history of the Canadian banking system. Like very fond of Canada right now, which is like, it's a new origin, I think. Yeah, yeah. Well, I found it interesting how it kind of explains the path dependence of how each country gets to where it is. Speaking of Canada, what's your advice for Mark Carney? Yeah, I mean, it's like funny. Our partnership is very, very storied and layered.

1:31:58And somehow your board members know my province. So that's fun. Look, I love Canada. I live now more in Canada than Germany for longer. I think it's a beautiful project. It's a beautiful implementation of different implementation from the United States or from Europe of classical liberalism. It's very much veered into socialism under Trudeau. He pushed that very, very hard. I am very much hoping that Mark is helping all of Canada to figure out that that's a successful discovery of something that doesn't work. Because obviously that kind of push socialism always leads to poverty. The problem with socializing is eventually run out of other people's money.

1:32:40Exactly. And so it's just like, and it doesn't need it because it's such an incredibly, like, I mean, I built Canada's largest company now at this point by market cap. As an immigrant, I think that advantage I had as an immigrant is I wasn't sort of aware that we are supposed to, you know, make small plans, so I made big plans, you know, just like, and held everyone accountable to that. And it turns out you can build world-class companies if you do that. and there doesn't need to be any kind of inferiority like there. And also, from first principles, it's just like, I mean, first of all, it is attached next door to the best consumer market on planet Earth.

1:33:18Until 50 miles ago, we were good friends. And it has in the ground basically as much, like, it's number one, two or three on every single resource that is of value in the next manufacturing buildup age. So like we should probably get on extracting some of those resources and do something. I think it can be richest country in the world if it chose so and it just needs to make a decision that it wants that. And I'm very optimistic about Mark, you know, pushing into that direction And I hope he's going to push very, very far because I think there's no advantage of waiting. So taking economic growth and GDP growth seriously, which has obviously plateaued somewhat in Canada in recent years, and then being willing to make the potentially controversial policy decisions and kind of changes that are required to actually enable that.

1:34:14Well, I mean, the things that are controversial policy decisions are just like controversial for path dependence, not for not real. Like, Canada has something crazy to tell people, but it has this incredible heartburn over pipelines, which are things that go underground next to highways. And it's just like, no one knows that there's a pipe. The only thing a pipeline does is you don't need diesel trucks. That's the only thing. And you can save a lot of diesel. It also changes the cost basis. And Canada has all these resources, and they need to somehow get to ports. And so it just feels like these tiny little implementation details.

1:34:53It's like as if computer manufacturers would somehow get down on copper cables. It's a weird thing. So depoliticizing just implementation details that professionals can do. It's odd because Canada, for instance, doesn't have this on nuclear power. Where I live in Ontario, the grid is entirely clean. It's like the Bruce nuclear power plant, which we constantly build more reactors for, which is like every time under budget and before schedule, like six, seven gigawatts now and just humming and then the rest of that. It's the cleanest grid in the world. And so like the funny thing is it doesn't even need it because it has all the other stuff too that it could just use, but we could have this too.

1:35:35So like I think there's like the blueprint is obvious. But actually, so my main advice to him is always like I want him to, in fact, ideally talk to you about the Shannon Economic Zone because I feel like it's like a blueprint for success in Canada because I think we can build data centers or space ports and stuff like this much faster. My hope is that Canada can build up an economy and a meritful market and so on, which makes it like can get back to doing what Canada's best, which is like succeed by helping America succeed and just like work together and let's go. And as you say, energy could be a big part of that.

1:36:14You mentioned nuclear. I was thinking about hydro, where obviously Canada has a ton of hydro already. Like you were saying, the seven gigawatt nuclear power station. But I think Le Grand River is a seven gigawatt project and could be a lot more. I think there's other phases that were not done. It's absolutely massive. On every single angle you look, it is every single time I learn about a new resource that people probably need a lot of. If I look, it's just like there. It's just unexplored. Maybe last question. We have your Daytona car here. What is the draw of motor racing to you? Yeah. I mean, I just love it, and it's surprising to me.

1:36:57Honestly, this is one of the weird... Sorry, is it or isn't surprising? It is surprising to me. So it's like, you know, so I love, like, kind of figuring out my own limitations or propensities. I think it's a game everyone is playing, I think, to some degree, maybe less conscientiously. I try on every hobby that anyone I admire gets into because it's like, maybe I'm interested in it too. I wouldn't know. Again, everything's interesting. Motorsports was not really something I high likelihood or betting average on liking because I didn't even have a driver license after coming to Canada after my German one expired.

1:37:34and so a couple of friends took me to like I had went to a track and I did went out and I just like me fell in love with it it's there's something just incredible and I love competing against myself I guess I think that's that's the thing I just like I race in races and I don't even try to win I'm like I'm still competing against myself and I see all the other cars as obstacles and so there's just like this beautiful thing about it's technical and you're connected with this like four basically playing card size patches of rubber to the ground and there's only so much grip to get out of them and like trying to get to like 99.9 % of like lateral acceleration or turning, understanding the weight transits of the cards and all these kind of things and trying to get to the best lap time you can and like the difference between that lap time and the theoretical possible lap time is just the, you know, exact report card of all your inadequacies as a driver.

1:38:40And like next lap, you try to do it slightly better and better and better and just hone this craft. It's like, just like the immediacy and the adrenaline, it's just like, it's just a brilliant thing which I discovered for myself. So, started taking it more seriously over a couple of years and now like the toner this year and hopefully do the big 24 hour which is a 24 hour relay race right like you swap with other drivers yeah that's right so one car 24 it's actually if you watch the Formula 1 cinema movie that starts at that race which was also really fun to see it's like I've done the getting up in the middle of the night walk exactly down that first scene where Brad Pitt walks like down to the pits and only our pit stall was even exactly the one he went to there like in the movie and then get in the car and you're very very tired in the middle of the night So I have to say.

1:39:31I found out recently they sold sponsorships for the fake F1 teams in that movie and made a lot of money on that. Brilliant. Incredible bit of product placement. I mean, if you think about it, Formula One itself is such a made-up thing. It's so synthetic. We just decided to create a document, which is a set of rules. And somehow, because that document existed, 20 teams moved cars around Planet Earth, which is also one of the bull cases. I don't even believe in AI unemployment to begin with. It's not how things work. But if you were worried about it, F1 is a good... F1 is kind of proving that we can just make up completely incredible pursuits, especially with AI and robotics.

1:40:12We can make it cheaper and then let's go. Yeah, there's a great... I mean, the history of F1 is super interesting. There was a great Colossus podcast on the history of F1 describing basically the Bernie Ecclestone era, which came with the emergence of TV, obviously. And there's even things like the different race schedules were not standardized. And there was like multiple, like not every team would show up to every race or whatever. And so he really kind of harangued everyone into kind of a standardized thing. But then it feels like the modern era, especially with Netflix, I think they've very successfully internalized that they're selling an entertainment product.

1:40:44And some people will watch every race every weekend. But like, I'm not going to watch every F1 race. But I will watch Drive to Survive. Like that is an appropriate short form amount of F1 for me. And so I think they've actually very savvily internalized that their F1 is an entertainment product. And it needs to be kind of consumable in all the appropriate form factors. And they just gave access to the sort of intriguing politics and just characters behind it. Like Formula One drives up crazy people, right? It's a nutty thing to basically drive a billboard around at 350 kilometers an hour. So, like, the characters are larger than life and, like, absolutely, like, driven.

1:41:23They're almost zero-sum competitors you can imagine. No one's there to just compete against themselves. And part of how it works, I remember hearing Zach Brown, the McLaren team principal, talk about how Netflix is everywhere and, you know, the paddocks and around and things like that. And he was saying, yes, you're aware that you've, like, signed a thing that, like, Netflix microphones will be everywhere. But they're really savvy where they'll have the, like, in a spy movie, They'll have the directional microphones trained on you from like a super far away distance. And you just end up forgetting that like you're on a hot mic your entire day while trying to actually manage a race.

1:41:56And so I think they get authentic content because, yeah, in theory, people know that they're on camera and on a microphone all the time. But you actually just can't live your life that way. You know, you just forget. And so they actually get kind of interesting content. I completely agree. And it's like the season is long. They do many races. It's actually amazing what they do. you know like a very fantastic athletes they lose like 5, 10 pounds yeah yeah yeah Singapore night race so it's pretty amazing and like it's a fantastic sport I actually love what Netflix did because like I mean Liberty Media is one of those companies you kind of have to like Germ alone like I mean Cable Cowboy is already one of the best it's a great book it's such a great book and then like you know he wrote a book he's like it's coming out soon imminently I did not know it yeah he has an autobiography so that'll be that'll be fireworks yeah it'll be really good I agree Well, look, thank you, Joby.

1:42:45This was fun. This was super fun. So it's really, really fortuitous when you have an Irish pub just popped up in your office. Exactly, yes.