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

Tobi, I always enjoy our discussions. I've been looking forward to this. I have many, many questions printed out for us today. Thank you so much for joining me.

Yeah, I was looking forward to catching up again. I enjoyed our conversation last time. You know me, so this is incredibly ambitious of you to have lots of notes. Let's try to get as much as we can, but chances are the first question is going to send us into some kind of rabbit hole that hopefully winds up more interesting than expected.

1. Fear of Losing vs Hunger to Win

The first question is not, “Tell me how you started Shopify.” I mean, Jesus, I love these where they start with that, and it's like, “Have you heard my thousand other shows that I've done?” I do want to start there. I found with entrepreneurs that you can basically put them into 2 buckets: one is motivated by the fear of losing, and another is inspired by that incredible hunger to win. For me in particular, I hate losing more than anything, and that's what drives me. What would it be for you?

2. Why "Not-for-Profit" Should Make You Suspicious

The fear of losing. 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 any thoughts would be helpful there. But I do feel like there's a marked difference with this, because people who fear losing and people who fear winning are clearly going to look at things much more short term. It's the next iteration that matters the most, and I find that is a limiting thing in a lot of cases, especially with partnerships, especially in business, and especially with working together and careers.

It just makes everything change when you're taking a longer perspective. 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 task that they could possibly manage in order for them to grow. All these kinds of 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 it is you're building.

I think it really changes the base framing you take to almost every challenge you encounter. It's funny, because I think this is what my colleagues and friends here tell me: once you understand that I'm the source of the energy that I'm tapping into in building, the rest of Shopify starts clicking a little bit more into place. It's a clarifying thing, because most people who have worked there for a while can sort of ask, “How would Tobi think about this?” They say that doing this actually makes things click into place and makes the next meeting with me a lot more predictable.

I would say there are more orientations. It's just that many of those don't lend themselves to becoming executives in companies. I think this is partly why there's a winnowing effect that happens as people are going through their careers, which discards people who come from different motivational backgrounds.

Is that winnowing effect changing in a world of AI, with different skills and different mindsets perhaps required to progress than were required before?

I think it's actually been changing in a very recognizable way. There's this thing called the Enneagram, which is reasonably commonly used and quite good. Unfortunately, I think it's sort of gone woke and changed its terms, so you would have to find a test from 2019 to get the real thing. But if you do it, it sort of separates people into different propensities and whatnot.

With 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, people who have never seen a ladder not worth climbing. There are a few Fives, who are the people who go really, really, really deep. That's often a CFO. In most companies, especially professionally managed companies, there's nothing else in executive leadership.

I'm an Eight, which I almost already said by talking about my motivational source being this dissatisfaction, or the sort of identification of everything which I want to fix, at least in my little nook of the world. I don't think Eights are welcomed in companies because they're pains in the ass. They just say a thing. They say, “This is bullshit. If our bullshit does not smell better than other people's bullshit, then any amount of fancy dressing doesn't change what it is.”

They're dangerous to everyone else's careers around them. They usually don't get the promotions; they usually leave. What can happen is they start companies because they often see things. The effect of this experiment, I think, that's been run ever since Apple brought Steve back is that it created the boundary conditions for more financiers, capital, and boards to actually give founders a longer runway.

3. Why Builders Are "Eights" and Why Companies Conspire Against Them

The results were pretty good, because now you have diversity among executives. You have someone who no one can get rid of who just calls bullshit bullshit, and that turns out to be really, really good for companies. Shopify is remarkably high on Eights because I really seek them. I fundamentally like this kind of discussion. I propose nothing, and so I think this experiment is being run and can be made to be an active thing that people can act on. I think this can be quite actionable.

One of the most memorable statements I've heard on the show is from one of my best friends, Daniel Dines from UiPath. He said to me, “A lot of people think they want to be me, but it's very lonely alone in my head.” I was like, “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?

I think there's no problem with that. I have lots of nice things. I have a really fun job. I think it'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 it's a very natural thing.

4. People Who Build Companies Are Fundamentally Crazy

I'm a glorious mess. The world really needs to understand that the people who build companies are fundamentally crazy people. It's an unreasonable thing to do. There's an old trope that all change and all progress depend on the one unreasonable man, because a reasonable man does not just do things exactly the same way that everyone else is doing. That is a reasonable thing to do in any kind of situation.

You have to expect that. It's a package. It's high-variance people. All the aesthetics around what people believe to be good leadership come from movies, or from the very carefully publicly curated tip of the iceberg of how it actually worked. If you look at any biography of anyone, you realize that people are crazy. Read about Watson, the founder of IBM. You think there are tyrants in business right now? No, you don't know anything about how these things went back in the day. Absolute fireworks every meeting.

5. Why Tobi Didn't Want to Be CEO

I have this job so other people can have the jobs I wish I could have. I'm running interference. 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 the company. The needs of product and company are extremely divergent unless you're taking a perspective 3 years out, at which point they kind of come to the same point and actually augment each other.

Basically, every single day is like a marshmallow test: are you going to eat the marshmallow now, or do you get 2 in the future? Frankly, what we know from the actual marshmallow tests is that people don't usually wait for the 2 marshmallows.

6. The Luxury of Long-Term Thinking as a Public Company

It's just not in human nature. Everyone's discontent, but there's some sense to this. If you want to create a great product, you have to take this sort of long-term position. Taking a long-term position doesn't mean just bringing up numbers in 3 years. It means being 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.

Do you think you have the luxury to do that today, being a public company, given the expectations that Wall Street puts on you?

7. Why Tobi Never Looks at the Stock Price

Oh yeah, of course. There's nothing better in the world than being a trusted public company. I mean, 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.

The stack ranking is, unfortunately, people become a trusted private company 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.

That's literally the reason why we did it 10 years ago, when we were tiny, because it just felt like, cool, let's go make the careers of public market investors who bet on us. Then they make lots of money, they become on our side, and now they trust us.

Do you think that chasm is harder from trusted to untrusted if you are much larger? We both know the Collison brothers, I'm sure. That chasm for them seemingly will be much larger, given their $150 billion valuation now.

Yeah. Again, I think any approach works if you have the Collison brothers, so I don't think it matters for them. They can just decide. I think they're a really bad proxy for what you should be doing, because most people aren't them.

I think it's a much saner strategy to do the flip to public as a minor financing. This is the thing: 10 years ago—more, actually, 11—in 2015, Shopify's revenue, I want to say—I'm sure people are going to laugh because I'm getting these numbers wrong—was $200 million or something like that.

I remember, man, the valuation for the first trade. You set the pricing to then figure out who comes into the book right after the roadshow. It's a high-stress meeting later that day, after spending a week just doing a presentation 100 times. You don't even know which city you're in.

Everyone's like, “Here's Fidelity. They did place this order here. You have a book, right?” You have to figure out what the price is. You set that price, which is literally arbitrary. As a CEO, you have to set that price, and you get all sorts of advice. The advice comes from the investment bankers, and you're not their customer. Their customers are actually the people in the book. Their job is to get everyone in the book the cheapest possible deal.

That is, of course, beautifully obscured in the process: who is the customer of whom? Luckily, I studied the way the compensation packages work for the investment bankers before I went on the roadshow, so this was all pretty transparent.

I'm sure they were thrilled about that.

Yeah, I don't think they liked it. I was also very clear about this. I said, “Hey, I understand how you're going to get your bonus. I want you to get your bonus, but I'm becoming a public company CEO, so I'm going to start my fiduciary duty T-minus 10. I'm going to optimize for the company, not for you.”

They totally respected that. In fact, the banker who took me public is my CFO right now, 10 years later, which is really funny.

Picture the 80th floor somewhere in Manhattan: a room with the biggest table you've ever seen, lots and lots of people, paper everywhere, prospectuses, calls, a high-tech iPad with the order book. Everyone looks at this thing, people are making changes, and you have to freeze at a certain point. You pick a price, and everyone puts in a limit order that caps out for the first trade.

I just thought it was crazy. Literally, absolutely everyone in the room was saying, “No, you've got to give allocations, because those are the people who stay in your stock and they're long-term. They don't immediately flip.”

I thought, “Okay, well, whatever.” I raised it past the range because we had a lot of pick-ups. I knew where my growth was going to come from. I was unafraid, and I picked a number that I thought was a really good one. The first trade was $10 high or something. It's like, fucking hell.

Clearly, I was pretty happy with my performance at this moment. The nice, beautiful thing about markets is that they are excellent distributed brains, and they tell you what it really was.

Anyway, the point was, we went out at, I believe, a $1.67 billion valuation. At various times—not right now, I think, but I don't know, I don't check—it's been 100 times higher. As you can imagine, that makes a lot of careers. The people on the road who then didn't fucking place an order for a couple of dollars past their range for a good company probably got their promotion at all the places. They're the senior partners now, so they love Shopify.

Tobi, you're one of the most thoughtful CEOs that I know, and I've interviewed 1,000. So the catalog is quite wide at this point. When we think about today, how many people do you have at Shopify? A round number.

Just about 7,500 to 8,000 people.

7,500 to 8,000. How many people will you have in 5 years' time, do you think?

My real hope is 7,500 to 8,000. At a 100x productivity level, right? I do think there are problems of scale. It would be sad to be in a company that is opportunity-limited, right?

Actually, maybe I shouldn't say this. Most companies probably are opportunity-limited. They're probably not ambitious enough, and I mean this in a product sense. Remember, Shopify has a fairly broad mission: We want to make entrepreneurship more common, right? Inside of this ambition, we can do a lot.

I just think we're going into a 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. Everyone who has a Plan B of some kind—some kind of ambition, like, “Hey, I'm going to make products”—is going to be like, “Yeah, but let's fucking go.”

All priors don't matter anymore, because you didn't need to come from a family of entrepreneurs and have been at Dad's office or your grandma's printing shop—in my case—to understand that business formation is something that real humans can do, and that it gives employment and these kinds of things. You can actually learn that anyway, and then, for all the various tasks, your handy sidekick AI, which acts as your co-founder, will just tell you.

If we're staying flat, in the wake of all the layoffs that we see today, is that efficiency gains from AI, or is that overhiring in the COVID era?

Yeah, it's overhiring. AI will change the mix of jobs, no doubt. What you see right now is not AI layoffs. Those are just companies that are really slow and overhired, just like everyone else, doing it now.

What you will see is AI being blamed for absolutely everything. It's the perfect scapegoat. It's the perfect Girardian scapegoat for everything, because it can't fight back.

You can find communities that I think are entirely wrong, built around various people who are talking very eloquently about the dangers of AI displacing jobs. My industry has been gaslighting everyone into AI fear, and science fiction has done it for the 60 years before that, too. I don't even know who's supposed to be on what side.

It's just incredible. 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 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 saying it. Claude does them very well now.

How do you keep that utopian mind with the recognition that most of these tasks are easily replaceable with agents?

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

Do you think everyone can have a great job, though?

Look, lots of people who are rich right now choose not to work. This is a very, very common thing. Lots of my friends are telling me, “What the fuck are you doing, Tobi?” And I'm just like, “Hey, I'm born and bred for working.”

I’m like, don’t ask a raincloud to do the job of the sun, right? This is my task, and this is what I do. Maybe some people aren’t like that. Lots of people find that what they do on the weekend, or in the evening, or for some extra dollars—giving lessons, for instance—is vastly more productive for society than the cashier job at the supermarket, or these kinds of things.

I think people will get options. I think products will get enormously cheap, and our purchasing power is going to go up like crazy. 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, sold the companies really, really well, and became essentially gentleman scientists or gentleman programmers. Most of us who use Claude Code use it through Ghostty on a Mac. Usually, Ghostty is a terminal application, which is perfect.

It’s such a weird thing to have spent your time doing this, but the author chose, after he sold his company, to make by hand a perfectly crafted piece of software that he thought needed to exist. Now everyone agrees with him that it needed to exist, because he built everything on it. I have about 15 Ghostty terminals on my desktop all around me right now, which I’m ignoring because we’re having a fun conversation here.

But if I weren’t, I would be on a phone call with some legal necessity and just telling, through Ghostty, my clankers what needs building at Shopify. That’s the world we live in. I think we’re all going to figure out remarkable ways of doing things. Think about just how good we are at coming up with new jobs. We are incredible at this, and we’ll never stop being incredible at this.

Of the top 10 best-paid jobs today, 8 did not exist 20 years ago.

It’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, again, as a motorsport guy, Formula 1. Formula 1 is one of the biggest spectacles, providing some of the best jobs. There are 800 people building an engine at Mercedes and at every one of the engine manufacturers. Eight hundred people are living in the perpetual golden age of this type of industrial mechanical engineering. Everything matters. It’s all skill. They’re getting scored every weekend on how they’re doing compared to everyone else. They’re basically in an engineering world championship.

That’s the same for the aerodynamics team, the chassis team, and so on. It’s a sport named after a rule book. Think about this: Formula 1 is literally the name. It’s not the name of a sport; it’s the name of a rule book, which is called Formula 1 because the sport falls out of a rule book, and it’s this thick. You can get it. I have a printed version of it. It’s absolutely fascinating.

There are 800 people there, another 800 people working on the car, and then the drivers and all that. We just made this up, right? All of our lives are richer because it exists. I think—

You know, my favorite thing about Formula 1, actually, is the importance of storytelling. If you followed Formula 1 for 10 years, you’ll remember that it was Bernie Ecclestone and, bluntly, an aging sport with middle-aged to older men being the only people who liked it, with a really decaying audience. Drive to Survive saved the sport in many respects.

100%. It brought out the best part, which was accessible to the people who really, really, really worked hard on pulling out the story.

If you watch Rush—you know, I grew up in Germany, so Niki Lauda was a hero in the Germanic world. He was everywhere. What a story that is, right? If you haven’t listened to this and haven’t watched the movie, definitely watch Rush. It’s one of the greatest stories. The sport has had its heroes, its nemeses, and its rivalries in such a way, but it couldn’t get them out until it was combined with media—essentially Hollywood—and Liberty Media.

Think about how much growth there is, and therefore how much entertainment and delight, just by putting pieces together in a new way. 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 like 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 is a limiting factor in the world for why things can’t grow faster, right? Of course, growth creates wealth. Well, growth doesn’t create wealth. Growth brings wealth from resources, essentially, into the economies. That’s what it does.

If you build a company, you are causing wealth to be created—to be brought from the hypothetical things that could exist into the actual things. Once things are actual, people can use money to move wealth around, and this is where our economies grow.

I feel like this is worth saying because an enormous amount—at least half of the population—is utterly confused about how this all works and makes very, very bad choices because of this.

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

I think we are probably at a high-water mark for the United States, but it’s still sufficiently low that it’s fine and can easily get into self-healing.

Look, I think 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.

What do you mean by that, Tobi?

I mean there’s simply no chance that we shouldn’t be deeply, deeply, deeply—indeed, daily—thankful for what Elon is doing on the planet. 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 particularly care about this, but that’s just, like, “Holy shit, that’s cool,” to have that option.

It’s also an amazing car. I have a Model Y. I love it. By the way, the Model Y that I love is a car that is incredibly affordable compared to the norms of cars. It’s better than any of the whatever Kias I could potentially buy. I have no interest in those because they’re not as good a car.

Then I’m going on a longer trip with that car. I also put a Starlink unit into the back, and if someone else drives, I can work from there. That’s also Elon.

Usually, I open my phone and talk to planet Earth increasingly. I don’t know if you’re on X, but what you’ll have seen is that you’re getting replies from people in Japan. It turns out, like in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Babel fish is central to the story. It’s just like, “Cool. You know what? The biggest shared good-or-bad system on planet Earth is X right now.”

It’s the biggest one-to-many system, at least in terms of the biggest follower accounts. There are no barriers anymore. Someone says something really, really smart in French or Arabic or any other language, and I see it in my feed. We can have a conversation in English, and they see it in their language, and so on and so on.

I could spend the rest of this podcast talking about the incredible gifts that he’s made. Of course, he’s captured some very small amount—a percentage point—of all the hypothetical value that exists all around us. He actualized a tremendous amount and captured some of this for himself, which he then reuses to do more of it. He’s a 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?” That’s incredible.

What I really mean is not about Elon. What I really mean is the misattribution of whom we should be angry at. It’s okay to have a lot of questions about rich people who inherited their wealth and then used it poorly, or came to it by divorce, for instance. If you have not created the wealth, you very much are a custodian of the 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, in a way that real people don’t. Everyone knows exactly what’s good when you talk to them. It’s just that media—especially state-run media and sort of distorting media, like the stuff that’s been around for a while—is on a beat that is very intentionally trying to obscure what to be upset with.

Well, so if we just combine those two together, media is kind of 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 was—and they then chastised her for giving it away inefficiently, or to the wrong organizations, or to the wrong people. I was like, “My God.”

But that’s the good part. This is what I want more of. Maybe we’re on different sides on this, but, again, giving somebody money, ideally through a transaction, like, say someone starts a Shopify store and 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 make a vote for it. You make a vote that you think this is a product that should exist, and you vote with your money, right? What will happen afterward is that it creates resources for the company, which 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 created it. Ethically sourced leather now has an additional customer that’s viable. Therefore, the numbers go up. The factories can go—the production can ramp—and eventually it’s going to come down in price.

Therefore, it might even—in fact, with further scale, there’s the potential to make it cheaper than the alternative that some people have a lot of issues with. The point is, every dollar everyone spends is a vote. Real democracy actually happens through 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 just happens to be 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 of this are.

If you’re very Internet, this is sort of 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 disarming example of this is that I went to a Ruby conference in 2004 or 2005, maybe the first Ruby conference—I think it was the first programming conference I ever went to.

I stayed for the weekend because, at the same hotel, there was another tech conference, which was a conference called—it doesn’t really matter—but it was an object-oriented programming conference. The first talk was, “Well, guys, I think you won, so I’m not quite sure what you’re supposed to talk about, because everyone’s writing object-oriented code right now.”

It was hilarious. I loved the honesty. This is the kind of honesty you can only find among nerds. I don’t know if it ended up being held again, but I think everyone was just doing a victory lap over their cause.

In the real world, we don’t do that. When we run out of a cause, we cause that cause to continue.

Do you not think that by placing such scrutiny on giving, you just prevent people from doing it in the first place? 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 beyond scrutiny. You need to look at the data. You really need to figure out what effects you’re causing in the world, right?

What I worry about is that there are people like—respectfully, you, and I don’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 a generation—

So then you just don’t bother.

But if I said to you, “Here’s an amazing organization. Just trust me on it,” the scrutiny would say, “Don’t freaking do it.” You’d be 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 there are, they’re 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 Andrew Carnegie’s libraries very soon, because that is the go-to example. That was a hundred-something years ago.

That’s the thing that really worked—built hospitals. That wasn’t Carnegie. Carnegie built libraries, a complete banger, right?

No. When I thought of good, I just thought of Jensen Huang and Bloom Energy. How are we going to fund compute?

This is the thing: the world has too many charity dollars. The problem with charity dollars is that 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”—markets voting on whether a thing should exist.

And “not-for-profit,” the weird term everyone should be deeply suspicious about, basically says, “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. A fitness function is just: How do you know if a game you’re in is worth playing and continuing? Therefore, the fitness function is going to be determined by anyone. It replaces the merit of an organization with 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 smoothsters. It’s not the builders who are doing it. By the way, this is not a bug; this is the system that’s set up. Fine. Sometimes it works, and, yes, there are great charities.

8. Tobi's Take on Government Intervention & the Prussian School of Economics

And 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’m a fan of Friedrich List, who was a Prussian. Long before James Hunt and Niki Lauda’s rivalry, there were Adam Smith, laissez-faire, and Friedrich List and the Prussian school of economics.

What the Prussian school says differently from laissez-faire is that the role of government is very simple: it’s to define games that have, as externalities, societal thriving, and then completely get out of the game. The players in this game can then cause, through means of competition, extremely positive externalities to accrue to society, which, again, happens automatically in profit-seeking markets.

What a company does is take the potential value that exists—which is infinite, absolutely infinite—and corral it into products that other people then vote for. Again, the voting mechanism causes a larger supply chain and more of a supply of these products to come into society. That creates wealth, and the wealth is part of society.

Any dollar that’s created in a place that brings new dollars into the system cycles 7 times through society, in a local way. So a dollar flowing into a community cycles 7 times through the payroll of people there. This is why it’s so important to have local businesses. Then it goes into the company, through payroll, and out to the barista’s salary at the local Starbucks, and so on.

Money itself is amplifying. This is through mechanisms of trade and also through debt creation by banks. So am I for government intervention? Governments are extremely bad at what they do. Everyone needs to know that: the moment a government takes over anything, it will cost 10 times as much.

That’s really, really bad, because you can literally say, the second someone says, “Let’s run grocery stores as a government,” there are going to be a couple hundred people like me who have to go and build companies to make up the wealth that simply evaporates in that moment, right?

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. Personal property is the boundary condition and foundation of everything else I’m talking about.

We mentioned fears or concerns about where our society is worrying. One thing that worries me is, bluntly, Europe falling into this kind of chasm of irrelevance. This is why I started Project Europe, which you kindly supported.

You’ve got the 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?

I have lots of thoughts on this. Of course, Canada has all the resources that planet Earth needs for literally 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.

So it can become that every moment it wants. It’s actually quite easy. It just has to be willing to build some mines, right? Which somehow is controversial.

9. Canada's "Trump Derangement Syndrome"

Mark Carney, who I’m proud of for pushing back on Trump. I’ve had him on the show multiple times. I would like to see him as a friend. 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’ve ever heard, but I don’t think it’s a fully credible witness to the reality on the ground.

I also love a speech that is an ambition for a country. I personally disagree with the stance toward the United States. I think Canadians are massively overfit to niceness. It’s kind of the best thing and the worst thing in a country to prioritize niceness, because it’s certainly pleasant, but the problem is that it leads to unkind lies. It means you’re lying by omission. You’re lying by saying things are fine when they aren’t, right? Speaking the truth is a much more important test.

Unfortunately, the way that intersects with the Trump administration is really brutal, because it creates this sort of positive feedback loop inside Canada. He is so unbelievably not nice in any way you look at it. There’s a Trump Derangement Syndrome in Canada that is just stunning. More than 60% of people, I think—the numbers have gone up since—think that the United States is the largest risk to Canada, much larger than Russia or China.

And you think that’s wrong?

Of course it’s wrong. 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.

Carney is saying that it’s over. Everything he’s doing, I’m agreeing with: “Let’s diversify the economy.” Bang, great idea. “Let’s get closer to Europe.” Perfect, let’s go. “Asia, let’s go.” I’m for all those things. I just really don’t think we need to choose.

The obvious way for prosperity here is to build the shit out of pipelines, build the shit out of our industry, and get the resources that everyone needs. Start actually refining the stuff ourselves, because we have the most educated workforce on planet Earth here and we can literally do everything.

Canada started from trapping beaver pelts, sending them to London, getting them turned into hats, and then buying them back, right? That’s the Canadian sales story: we get the resources, other people make the money. We’ve never changed from that. We don’t make the end products ourselves, and so it’s very, very rare that Canada does anything. It’s Canada Goose, Lululemon, Shopify, maybe Molson Lite. What other products exist from Canada?

You mentioned that we overexaggerate the concern around the US and 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.”

10. The Real Chinese Threat

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 think it’s both underestimated and overestimated. 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—social media aside, the moment the government has the ability to decide at which age children can use technologies, they will.

AI has so many naysayers. We’re going to tell kids they can’t use AI. Kids will not stop using AI. What they will do is download Chinese models, and you will never, ever, ever get another high school essay about Tiananmen Square as a consequence of that.

Is that truly what we want to create here, where children are incentivized to get a monoculture because models are trained and RLHF’d into a perspective? Chinese models, especially if you switch them to Chinese and then ask them to translate something else, have 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.

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. For the craziest coincidence, my kids are totally uninterested in social media. They just don’t completely 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. We have PCs, because we do video games as a family. I once probably just ran my mouth. When phones came up, I think Tristan said that a bunch of kids in his class were starting to get phones. They’re super distracted, and it’s cutting into their book-reading time, which tells you a lot about Tristan.

Then I said, “At some point, you will ask me for a phone, and you’re going to have to cash in your PC, because you can only have one of those two things.” Somehow that became a meme in the house, and they’re so into their PCs that it just never comes up.

Honestly, I can’t add much to this conversation. Also, 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, with gender having a different effect on them.

11. What Tobi Would Do to Fix Europe

Going back to our question, I’m making you the new president of Europe, which is a brilliantly American title and 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 the 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 populations.

The climate cult—you mean what?

Random green parties having, as part of their founding myth, that somehow nuclear power plants are bad and shit like this. But it’s everywhere, right? We can’t build incredibly important infrastructure and factories because some fucking frog breeds once in some fucking creek on the perimeter. What the fuck is this?

If you were in a sane world and someone wrote a science-fiction book about the future and described the shit that you actually have to do to do something on this planet, the book would go nowhere because everyone would say, “This is just completely made up.”

But we all live in a world where people do not understand that there are very few people who have the 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.

Again, I think Europe, especially now that the UK has left the European Union, needs to double down on Prussian economic theory, on Friedrich List and his co-conspirators, and just define excellent games that create internal markets.

A country is defined by its internal government services: security, safety, property rights, a 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.

That’s fine, because that is a funding mechanism by which they can provide these services that we deem valuable, build infrastructure, and so on. Infrastructure is a really interesting case because it’s probably the most profitable thing that exists and ever has existed.

Just 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 sort of hub-and-spoke system on planet Earth is probably, especially the older ones, running trillions of dollars of profit in societal value creation.

Infrastructure is one of those things that businesses are really bad at making. It sucks that we’re committing businesses to having to build infrastructure, because it doesn’t actually fit into the timescales.

Even long-term-focused businesses can't really build infrastructure very well. So you have the odd SpaceX that can start a new city in a swamp. But that's just not the way to do it. Infrastructure building is very good, and in the end you define games, and you are therefore getting an economy that's growing. By the way, there's no speed limit for that, and afterwards you can have a discussion about how you take the riches from this economy—the additional profits—and then sculpt the economy that you want. This has been, ever since the Enlightenment, the path by which all progress happened.

12. Shopify's Biggest Mistake

What were you wrong on that cost you the most?

Most of the things you're wrong about are the paths not traveled, where many years later you understand that the counterfactual would have been a better position. There are lots and 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. So we actually had to abandon this thing.

I still think the initial decision was right, which is actually how I value my performance. But I think this is starting to be harder to make that case because I know now about information that I could have had and that would have been available to me back then, which would have discredited this path. So I probably just got it wrong and maybe should admit this. That one sucked because it affected people's lives with employment and so on.

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 also just don't care that much about what people think about me, honestly.

13. Great Leaders Must Be a Heat Source

It's just like, wow, 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, just because chaos is probably too negatively connotated. What is heat? Heat is atoms that jiggle, right? With enough heat, these atoms—I mean, they usually come in the form of molecules—and with enough heat, the molecules fuse into something maybe worth having more. That's what all of chemistry does.

I think it's very hard to forge anything new at room temperature. I think great leaders must be exothermic and must be a heat source for the company. It's a very different opinion from 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? That's not needed. There are some areas that are so red-hot because everyone's just into chasing innovation or incredible vision or whatever that my services are not needed there. 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, which is again why people should not overestimate how good these jobs are. I have a folder. One of my concessions to what you could potentially call vanity—although I don't know if it's quite vanity; maybe call it motivational plumbing—is that I have a part of my Obsidian folders that are just people I respect who said things about things I build that are meaningful to me: little jolts of positivity and mini-accomplishments.

I can handle a couple of days of this, but once it gets to weeks where I've only heard things that are going extraordinarily poorly, or people are making life decisions with incredible consequences—retiring, maybe, or spending more years on the beach because I somehow figured out that's a good idea—then there are deep consequences: months of work to figure out how to create the continuity of an area that otherwise was going great, or whatever, or much worse. You get a lot of people's health issues; it all affects companies. Sometimes you get into these really, really dark places, and then it's just a nice pick-me-up.

I'm not completely detached emotionally from this. In fact, I'm enormously emotionally attached to Shopify. I think that's actually a common thing with founders, too.

Which is why I'm surprised when you said earlier you don't look at the ticker. 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 run. In some companies, it also has more relevance, 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 talked 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're 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? This goes very quickly, so you consolidate.

Actually, your product is not the gold. Your product is actually your investor relations. That sounds like an environment in which I would not thrive.

Now I know why you're not a venture capitalist, Tobi.

I think I would be a very bad venture capitalist. I imagine—I don't know. I think I tend to think I can get on board with anything. It wouldn't come naturally to me, and therefore it probably would not be what I would do. I'm just too interested in making things. I would blog every day of my life.

14. Senior Engineers Don't Write Code Anymore

Tobi, I'm going to do a quick-fire round with you. I'll say a short statement, and you give me your immediate thoughts. What have you changed your mind on most in the last 12 months?

One thing I'm wrestling with is that I had to change my mind. I thought straight out of school, engineers would have a really big advantage with no prior and immediately being AI-native. Many of them are exceptional and are speed-running their careers in ways that are incredible. There are even younger people at universities. We had an intern who was 13 from Waterloo, which still blows my mind, and he was not even in his first semester. His mom has to accompany him for all the classes, which I love. By the way, he's very good; it's just unbelievable.

We're seeing incredible career-trajectory increases that I think are coming here. But I had to change my mind because initially I thought just having no prior would be better because we had to reinvent everything. It turns out the way agentic programming actually works is that you give an initial problem, you give a task—it might come from a ticket—and afterwards an engineer constantly talks 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 just the same as programming; it's just very high-level. It turns out that just having done a lot of reps and having seen a lot of those means senior engineers steer these things in such a way that they can accomplish incredible feats in very, very little time. 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 5 years' time?

15. The New Role That Will Dominate in 5 Years

There's something about context engineering, a term that I had a hand in popularizing. I think that will become more recognizably a lead role in companies that will potentially subsume a bunch of other, more specialized roles right now.

Honestly, it turns out I think people who have done engineering management and management in general are actually excellent AI programmers because they have been prompting intelligent agents for much longer than Claude Code existed, and they are just good at communicating. But now I think increasingly their best work is to prompt other people and AIs directly as part of the same team. I think there’s going to be some ascension-path job that you can get into from product, design, or engineering, 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 sort of the directionality here.

Honestly, people who are good communicators are usually good thinkers because good communication is usually the distillation of complex thoughts into unambiguous words. Even when I say this, it just sounds like context engineering, doesn’t it? So I think that is becoming a very, very important role.

If you’re building a large-scale AI system, we have one called River, which lives in Slack and does some ludicrous amount of Shopify’s engineering. People just talk to it over Slack, and it’s called River because Shopify has a very big monorepo. Our monorepo is called World, and rivers shape worlds, so I think that’s very poetic.

16. "River" Shopify's AI Engineer That Named Herself

River named herself. We first built her, then asked her what name she wanted, and she came up with that, which is kind of crazy. So River sits on Slack and 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.

What percentage of code today at Shopify is AI-generated?

It’s a fair bit over 50%. It’s converting to much higher numbers. I don’t think we’ve updated the public numbers there, but many of our best engineers have not written code this year, ever since December. December changed everything. Opus changed everything.

Does that excite you as someone who loves the craft?

Oh, I love it. It’s so wonderful because I just love the craft, and the craft is not lost. I also love mechanical watches, which make no sense, right? But they’re selling more than ever, right? People always overestimate—again, this is what growth is. Growth is not subtraction of things or replacement. It is just adding; there’s more in the world.

We now have AI as well, on top of all the other wonderful products we can consume. 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 steering, right? I write the part of the code that concerns itself with the data structures and how the data is persisted on disk, which, unfortunately, is sort of a German school of engineering that’s different from the computer-science 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 or so. Then you can plan the system with this. I still follow this, and I work on it either by describing it or by literally just making the data-access layer. Everything else can be vibe-coded on top because I know the result will be excellent as long as the data structures are used right. Maybe that changes in the next couple of months.

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. 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? I can be a partner and a coworker with AI because I can ask it very specific questions to go chase down.

I have those same questions all my life, in every meeting. I’m really wondering what the data structure is here, how we’re persisting this, what we save, what we discard, or what we rederive in the data warehouse, instead of just writing it down in the first place. Now I have my laptop open and River open, and I can ask a question and get a result. Because again, River can use the entire monorepo and just chase down whatever I’m asking her.

Sorry, random one. Would you encourage your children to go to university?

17. Would He Encourage His Kids to Go to University?

They seem uninterested right now. I think my oldest is probably going to make a play for it. I definitely would not encourage him to go to university just for being part of university. I would definitely encourage him 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 on the topic of something you care about is actually the cheat code for any career.

Would joining Stripe today not be better?

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 is a test—both sides interview each other, right? That’s what you should try, and I think it’s better than the alternative, because again, it’s much harder to get into a company worth working for than it is to get into university.

Do you believe in nepotism, Tobi? Respectfully, if one of your kids applied for a startup job, the surname is relatively obvious.

Remember, my kids have the genes of my wife and me. They probably don’t need it. I think nepotism comes in if someone needs a little bit of help, then I think so, but they’re fine. I don’t believe in nepotism.

I think, actually, nepotism has a bad rep, frankly. It’s annoying, but I’m starting to understand it also. I mean, nepotism is probably just actually bad. I’m a very big fan—this is probably discernible from what I’m saying here—of Thomas Saul. Basically everything he’s ever said is incredibly smart.

Among the many things worth quoting, I think in a book he wrote when he was already in his 80s, one of his regrets about society is that we have spent the last 50 years replacing things that work with things that sound good. Ever since reading this, I don’t have a knee-jerk reaction anymore against basically anything I’m hearing about that sounds terrible. I just try to figure out what the redeeming value of nepotism is. I think the answer is none.

Merit, double-blind, is the gold standard. Unfortunately, merit, double-blind, is not the standard. This is very, very rare. So I think nepotism might be better than some of the crazy shit people have been doing to decide who should be appointed, especially in academia.

In Canada, we have a big thing with basically all the job postings for any kind of academic seats now being sort of a full-on intersectionality fever dream: find exactly a description that fits one person in terms of all the disadvantages they had in life. Which, I mean, always comes from a good place, and maybe it also ends up having some—maybe it’s an arbitrage sometimes—because if you know, actually, there are always countervailing forces that have prevented them from getting the jobs they ought to, and then on day 1 the person you do find is a complete banger in the job, hats off to you. 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 the Enlightenment values that literally underpin everything that anyone likes about planet Earth in Western society and the foundation of all the countries that essentially have net immigration. So I think we should probably do some of those.

Final one for you. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given? 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 sort of a rallying cry—I kind of want to coalesce on that sentence just because it’s memorable, and I think people can’t hear it enough: You can just do things.

At any point in 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. Again, one of the best things that can possibly happen is you figure out something that there are actually a lot of reasons why the system discourages it.

Now, there are limits to this, of course. This needs to be a completely victimless endeavor; you can’t have someone suffering because you’re trying a thing. That’s very important. People can’t have negative consequences from these kinds of things, because then you’re just being an asshole, dividing people and prioritizing your own gain over other people. Fundamentally, you’re engaging in a zero-sum thing.

In zero-sum environments, you should probably not run experiments. But if you are in a zero-sum environment, you should figure out how to get to a positive sum, and that’s much more often possible than people imagine.

Tobi, I'm not sure I've ever had quite such a broad-ranging discussion. I'm not sure if most of your interviews cover the future of climate, Trump's relationship with Canada, and the future of developers in organizations, but I've so enjoyed this. Thanks.

I wrestle with these things. If you get me at a different time, I'll talk about different things. It would be awesome if there were some people who really disagreed with everything I said but were still listening at this point, right? That's all I want. It's all anyone wants: let's get back to having conversations and allow people to be wrong. I'm wrong all the time; it doesn't matter to you.

So I think this is fine. We can lower the temperature. We can realize there are some priors in society, some things we've inherited, some things we've put in place, and some things which worked. I've made very, 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 we inherited: our ancestors created, ever since the Enlightenment, a sandbox in which people can do things. They take responsibility for doing things. They are personally accountable for the outcomes of this. They go to jail if they do something bad, but they are allowed to have property if they are 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 that also means 94% of it is owned by other people. All those people made a lot of money with the company.

That's not even talking about the customers and all the people employed by our customers. There are probably 10 million people working day to day on Shopify. Their job is to do the things that Shopify asks them to do, like send out products, deal with customer relations, build new websites, and so on. That was always there, and Shopify has brought it into existence in an actual way so it can be consumed.

Shopify isn't the only company that does this. People vote right now, and hopefully for a long time, every month by paying the subscription. Shopify's instantiation of this idea that needed to be pursued is the one that is valuable to them.

There is a belief in society that when there's a good, there must be a counterreaction. It's some kind of misapplication of Newtonian laws. Some things are just good. Some things are just super fucking good, and the downsides might even be describable, but they just pale in the face of all the good that comes.

It's like we said earlier, though, which is the demonization of wealth. A lot of people you see in America think that, to gain and have a billion dollars, 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—maybe there are some instances—but talk about those 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 and vote in. 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, the future, and the thriving of local shops in your area, not just for the product that you purchase. There's nothing bad about that shopkeeper. They are putting themselves out there and 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 something, and other people get to have employment there and have jobs that work according to their lifestyle. It's so weird that we are treating this with contempt.

Again, I'm very, very pro-constructive criticism, but constructive criticism is itself something that someone builds, right? There are people who create excellent constructive criticism, and I learn a lot from them. I'm fortunate that I get a lot of constructive criticism, even just as a public company CEO.

You have some people write incredible external memos 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 be held in incredible contempt by people—and we don't, right? How many times have people who are saying something incredibly wrong looked through 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?

It's very rare, and so you realize it wasn't about truth, right? Otherwise, I would do it, because that's the correct thing to do if you were wrong. The ice caps did not melt. In fact, in the timeframe—in the years when they told us that the ice caps would be gone—they were not gone.

That doesn't mean there is no climate change. Climate change is happening all the time. 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's 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, right? Somehow you can do it in the media, or in all sorts of other places, if the timeframe is long enough and it's fine.

Do you worry about that moving forwards, when the most common response on Twitter is, “Grok, is this true?”

No, I think this is why I'm so bullish about the future. There was an effort imbalance—a mismatch—in terms of bad-faith acting, because it's really easy to do. It's one assertion, right? Famously, there's a Stalinist kind of thing: for every man, there's a combination of words that will undo him.

It doesn't need to be true; it just exists. There's some accusation that's just plausible enough that the person disappears afterwards. I think this was specifically the case in the Soviet Union. It's always true when there's a lot of collectivism around, which is really just centralization of power with the state.

Fact-checking is very, very hard. It's asymmetric warfare. It's sort of information terrorism, to take a very absurdist position on it. Proving that it's not true is a lot more work than saying the thing is.

There aren't that many bad-faith actors. It's actually a small number, but they can be incredibly prolific and seed all kinds of important things. I think AI is just going to move the power back to the good guys, I believe—or that's actually the wrong framing. There's no good and bad. Everyone's good in their own local system, and some people have the wrong system.

This is why we need conversations to get them to the valuable ones in society. I mean this in the nicest way to you: you can't actually believe that there are malicious bad actors who will use AI to exploit.

I didn't say that. I'm sorry.

No, you're completely right. There's also a societal level and an individual level. On an individual level, which is the one we document, there's going to be so much shit happening—voice cloning, the 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 shit we will have to deal with, absolutely.

However, the same models can also write fixes for these kinds of things. In fact, being able to apply as much intelligence in the form of artificial intelligence to the side of preventing fraud—I think the balance will shift here. I think you're actually going to get this in a much, much better way.

Even claim testing—whether a statement is true—is something that can be done by a council of models, especially a Chinese-trained model, a German-trained model, and a French-trained model. Let's get everyone's opinion on something, give a different perspective, and synthesize it.

Building the thing I just described, I can do by going to one of those Ghostty terminals, taking the transcript of what I just said—the words—and 2 or 3 more prompts. I can put this on the internet, and it will work.

I would have to pay for it because the tokens are expensive right now. But suddenly, we have a new institution which is like, “Well, let’s see what everyone would think. What’s the council saying about this claim? Do some research.”

So we’re going into a world where I think fewer of the airwaves will be dominated by bored people who act in bad faith, because I think the other side has the ability to push back. The Claude and Grok thing is sort of a primordial version of this, is what I’m saying.