People who fear of losing and people who fear of winning are clearly going to look at things in much more short term. The world really needs to understand that the people who build companies are fundamentally crazy people.
Now, I've known Toby Lütke for years. He's the founder and CEO of Shopify, a $160 billion public company. This podcast is a Toby you've never seen before. He was incredibly honest, very funny, and pretty controversial. Strap in. This is an absolute banger.
All the aesthetics around what people believe to be good leadership comes from movies. I have this job so other people can have the jobs I wish I could have. None of the people who are doing jobs that are just tasks have good jobs. The more wealth and resources an entity or even an individual has, the more deserving of scrutiny they are. What really sucks in the world is that we are prioritizing things that sound good over things that work. Giving money is not virtuous unless it causes the right things. I think great leaders must be exothermic and must be a heat source for the company. Many of our best engineers have not written code this year. Like December changed everything. Opus changed everything. Does that excite you? Ready to go.
Toby, I always so enjoy our discussions. I've been so looking forward to this. I have many, many questions printed out for us today. Thank you so much for joining me today first, dude.
Yeah, I was looking forward to catching up again. I enjoyed our conversation last time. So let's, yeah, and also you know me so therefore this is incredibly ambitious of you to have lots of nodes. Let's try to get as much as we can, but chances are the first question is going to snipe us into some kind of rabbit hole that then hopefully winds up more interesting than expected.
The first question is not tell me how you started Shopify. I mean Jesus, I love these where they start with and it's like have you heard my thousand other shows that I've done? I do want to start there. I found with entrepreneurs that you can basically put them into one of two 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? 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 you know, any thoughts would be helpful there. But I do feel like there's a marked difference with this because people who fear of losing and people who fear of winning clearly going to look at things much more short term. It's like the next iteration matters the most and I find that is a limiting thing in a lot of cases, especially with partnerships, especially in business, especially with working together, careers or so. It just makes everything changes when you're taking a longer perspective. It starts, you know, sitting down with people and helping them become the best version of themselves. You know, just like 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 kind of things will have significantly more compound advantage if you take a longer perspective because, you know, more of the benefits of these actions will accrue to whatever it is you're building. And so I think it really changes a base framing you take to almost every challenge you encounter. And it's funny because I think this is what my colleagues and friends here tell me is like once you sort of understand that being the source of energy that I'm tapping into building, actually the rest of Shopify starts kind of clicking a little bit more in place. It's sort of a clarifying thing because most people that I work there for a while is like they can sort of affect how would Toby think about this and then they say that doing this actually makes things click in place and makes the next meeting with me a lot more predictable. So I would say I think there's more orientations. It's just that many of those don't lend themselves to become executives in companies, right? So I think this is partly why there's a winnowing effect that happens as people are going through careers that discards people that come from different motivational backgrounds.
Is that winnowing effect changing in a world of AI with different skills and different mindsets maybe required to progress than were required before?
I think it's actually been changing in a very recognizable way. Okay. So there's this thing called Enneagram which is reasonably commonly used and quite good. Unfortunately I think it's sort of like it gone woke and changed its terms and so you would have to find one like low background in your test from 2019 to get the real thing. But if you do it, it sort of separates people in different propensities and whatnot. So this particular test, if I look through the executives I've worked with over the last 20 years, you end up with mostly achievers basically, the people who have never seen a hill not worth climbing. And there's some few fives who are like the people who go really, really, really deep, that's often a CFO. And so there's some there and in most companies, especially professionally managed companies, there's nothing else in exact difference. And I'm an eight which I almost already said by talking about my motivational source being this sort of dissatisfaction or the sort of identification of everything which I want to like fix at least in my little nook of the world. And so I don't think eights are basically conspired against in companies. They because they are pain in their asses. They just say a thing. They say like this is this is shit. Like if something if our shit does not smell better than other people's shit, therefore this is just exactly what it looks like and we don't any amount of fancy dressing doesn't change what it is. They are dangerous to everyone else's careers around them. They usually don't get the promotions, they usually leave, right? What can happen is they start companies because they do see often see things, right? And so the effect and the experiment I think that's been run ever since I think Apple brought Steve back. It just created the boundary conditions for more financiers, capital, boards to actually just give founders like a longer run, right? Like a longer run rate. And so and then the results were pretty good because now you have diversity with executives. You have someone who no one can get rid of who just calls shit shit. And that just turns out to be really, really good for companies. And so, Shopify is remarkably high on eights because I really seek them. I fundamentally like this kind of discussion. And so, you know, that's just like I mean, I propose nothing. And so I think this experiment is being run and I think can be made to be an active thing that people I think this can be quite actionable.
One of the most memorable statements I've heard on the show is from one of my best friends, Daniel Dines from UiPath. And he said to me, 'A lot of people think they want to be me, but it's very lonely, alone in my head.' And I was like, 'Oh, I've never felt so seen in my life, and that's why I'm in therapy.' When you hear that, how do you feel?
I think there's no problem with that. I totally like, look, I have lots of nice things. I have a really fun job. I think that's perfectly natural that a lot of people want to be me. Like they presumably do not want to spend the last 22 years the way I did. So you know, I think it's a very natural thing. Yeah, look, I'm a glorious mess, right? Like so it's just like the world really needs to understand that the people who build companies are fundamentally crazy people, right? It's an unreasonable thing to do. Like the old trope of like all change and all progress depends 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, right? So you got to expect that and it's a package. It's high variance people. It's like all the aesthetics around what people believe to be good leadership comes from movies, right? Or the very carefully publicly curated sort of tip of icebergs of how it actually worked. If you look at any biography of anything, it's like you realize like it's crazy people who cause this. Like read about Watson, the founder of IBM. Like it's just like you think there's tyrants in business right now. No. Like you don't know anything about how these things went back in the day. So absolute fireworks every meeting. And so I have this job so other people can have the jobs I wish I could have. But like 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 a company. Like because the needs of product and companies are extremely divergent unless you're taking a perspective 3 years out at which point they kind of become to come to the same point and actually augment each other. So basically every single day is like a marshmallow test, right? Like are you going to eat the marshmallow now or like you get two in the future? And like frankly, which we know from the actual marshmallow tests, like people don't usually wait for the two marshmallows. You know, it's just not in human nature. Everyone's discontent, but there's some sense to this. But if you want to create a great product, you have to take a very long-term position. And taking a long-term position doesn't mean just like bring up oh like numbers in three years. It means willing to have bad numbers for a while if you think this is going to lead to the right place and that's a hard choice to make. But it's
Do you think you have the luxury to do that today being a public company given the expectations that Wall Street puts on you?
Oh yeah, of course. Yeah, it's just big like 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. So like the stack ranking is like unfortunately people become a trusted private company but with their investors and have to actually take a step down to being an untrusted public company by going public. This is why people don't go public. They just can't deal with that which is funny because it's actually required to then get to the best spot in the end. So which is literally the reason why we did it 10 years ago when we were tiny because it just felt like cool like let's go make the careers of public market investors who bet on us and then we go and they make lots of money and then 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 Collisons I'm sure like that chasm for them seemingly will be much larger given their $150 billion price now.
Yeah. Yeah. I think I mean again I think everything like any approach works if you have a Collison brothers so like I don't think it matters for them. So they can just decide. I think they are really bad proxy for what you should be doing because most people aren't. So I think it's a much safer strategy to like do the flip to public as a minor financing. Like this is the thing like again 10 years ago, more actually 11, 2015, Shopify's revenue I want to say I mean I'm sure people are going to laugh because I'm getting these numbers wrong but like I don't know 200 or something million or whatever. I remember man like the valuation for first trade you set the pricing to then figure out who comes in the book right after the road show. It's like a high stress meeting later a day after like spending a week just you don't even know which city you're in just like doing a presentation 100 times. And you like everyone's like well here's Fidelity they did place this order here like you have a book right? And so you have to figure out okay well what is the price you set. You're literally arbitrary that you do. You as a CEO have to set that price and you get all sorts of advice. Now the advice comes from the investment bankers and you're not their customer. Their customers are actually the people in the book right? So their job is to get everyone in the book the cheapest possible deal. But they you know that is of course beautifully obscured in the process that who is the customer of whom. And luckily I sort of studied the way the compensation packages work for these investment bankers before I got went on the road. So this was all kind of pretty transparent and so anyway
I'm sure they were thrilled about that.
Yeah. Well yeah I don't think they liked it. I mean but yeah anyway I was also very clear about this. It's like, hey, I understand how you are going to get your bonus. So I will like you. I want you to get your bonus, but like I'm becoming a public company CEO, so I'm going to start my fiduciary duty t-minus 10. So I'm going to optimize for a company, not for you. So anyway, and then they totally respect that. In fact, the banker who took me public is my CFO right now. So like 10 years later, which is really funny. So high stress meeting like picture 80th floor somewhere in Manhattan, room the biggest table you've ever seen, lots and lots of people, paper everywhere, prospectuses, calls, high-tech an iPad. And with 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 it just like everyone put a limit order in that caps out at for the first trade. I just thought it was crazy. Like everyone in the room, literally absolutely everyone's like, 'No, it's like you got to give allocations because those are the people who stay in your stock and they're long-term. They don't immediately flip.' Blah blah blah. I just like, 'Okay, well, whatever.' I raised it past the range because we had a lot of pickups. I knew where my growth was going to come from. I was sort of unafraid and I picked a number which I thought was like a really good one. First trade was $10 high or something. It's like hell. It's like so clearly I was pretty much really happy with my performance at this moment and I should have. The beautiful thing about markets is they actually they are excellent sort of distributed brains and they tell you what it really was. Anyway, the point was we went out at I believe $1.67 billion dollar valuation and I think they I mean at various times not right now I think but like I don't know I don't check. It's like 100 times higher now. And as you can imagine that makes a lot of careers right? Like the people on the road who then didn't like not place an order for like a couple dollars difference past their range for good company probably got their promotion at all the places they are the senior partners now so they love Shopify.
Toby, you're one of the most thoughtful CEOs that I know and I've interviewed a thousand. So the catalog is quite wide at this point. When we think about today, how many people do you have in Shopify? A round number.
Just like about 7 and a half 8,000 people.
7 and half 8,000. How many people will you have in 5 years time do you think?
I mean, my real hope is 7 and a half to 8,000. Right. Like at 100x productivity level, right? I do think there's problems of scale. It would be sad to be in a company that is opportunity limited, right? Actually, maybe I shouldn't say this. Most companies probably are opportunity limited. They're probably not ambitious enough for and I mean this in a product sense like again remember like Shopify has fairly broad mission. We want to make entrepreneurship more common, right? And so inside of this ambition, we can do a lot. I just think we're going to go into golden age of entrepreneurship. It's by far the most AI safe job. It's by far the most AI benefiting job. Like think about that combination here. So everyone who has a plan B of like some kind of ambition of like, hey, I'm going to make products is going to be like, yeah, but let's go. All priors don't matter anymore because like you didn't need to come from a family of entrepreneurs and having been at dad's office or your grandma's printing shop in my case. To understand that a business formation is something that real humans can do and that gives employment and these kind of things you can actually I mean first of all you learn that anyway and then all the various tasks your handy sidekick AI will who act as your co-founder will just tell you right.
So if we're staying flat in the hope for all the layoffs that we see today is that efficiency gains from AI or is that overhiring in a COVID era?
Yeah, it's overhiring. Like AI will change the mix of jobs. No, no doubt. What you see right now is not AI layoffs. Those are just like the companies that are really slow that overhired just like everyone else doing it now. What you will see is like AI is going to be blamed for absolutely everything, right? Like because it's the perfect scapegoat. It's the perfect scapegoat for everything, right? Like it can't fight back. It's like in fact you can beautifully find communities which I think are entirely wrong but like they are around various people who are talking very eloquently about the dangers of AI even past jobs. And like my industry has been gaslighting everyone into like AI fear and like sci-fi has done it for the 60 years before that too. And so it's like I don't even know who's supposed to be on side. That doesn't mean like but it's just incredible. It's objectively mindblowingly making my life better in every which way like everything.
Do you think you have a utopian lens? When I look at what Claude can do when it comes to social media design, I'm being blunt. A lot of tasks which are not actually that difficult, but they are execution-oriented. I know I've done them, so people can't be upset with me for it. Claude does it very well now. How do you keep that utopian mind with the recognition that most of these tasks are easily replaceable with agents?
Look, because none of the people who are doing jobs that are just tasks for other people have good jobs. Like those are not good jobs. Being an automated task queue is not a great job. Great jobs are like things where you have agency and can produce things and make things.
Do you think everyone can have a great job though?
Like look, lots of people who are right now rich choose not to work, right? Like this is a very very common thing, right? So like lots of my friends are telling me like what the fuck are you doing Toby? And I'm just like, hey, I'm born bred for working. I'm like don't ask a raincloud to do the job of the sun, right? Like it's like this is my task and this is what I do. And maybe some people aren't. Lots of people what they do on the weekend or what they do in the evening or for some extra dollar like guitar lessons or so is vastly more productive for society than the cashier job at the supermarket right or these kind of things. So like I think people will get options. I think products will get enormously cheap. Our purchasing power is going to go up like crazy. And people will be able to make choices. We will find new ways of working together. We will find much more liquid ways of moving money around for value generated. You know I know multiple people who have built companies. They sold the companies really really well and they became essentially gentleman scientists or gentleman programmers. Like you know most of us who use Claude code use it through Ghostty on a Mac or usually Ghostty is a terminal application which is perfect right. And it's such a weird thing to have spent your time doing this but the author chose to after he sold his company to by hand make a perfectly crafted piece of software that he thought needed to exist and now everyone agrees with him on that it needed to exist because he built everything on it. I have like 15 Ghostty terminals on my desktop all around you right now. Which I'm ignoring because we're having a fun conversation here. But I wouldn't if I would be on a phone call with some legal necessity and just like telling through Ghostty to my clankers what needs building at Shopify. And so you know that's the world we live in. So I think we all going to figure out remarkable ways. Like 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, eight 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. And so like my favorite example of this is like again a motorsport guy is Formula 1. Like Formula 1 is one of the biggest spectacles providing the best jobs. There's 800 people building an engine at Mercedes and at every one of the engine manufacturers. 800 people are living in the perpetual golden age of this type of industrial mechanical engineering. Everything matters. It's all skill. They're getting scorecard every weekend how they are doing compared to everyone else. They are basically in engineering world championship and that's the same for aerodynamics team and chassis team and so on. And it's a sport named after a rule book. Think about this like 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. It's actually I have a printed version of it. It's absolutely fascinating. And so that's the 800 people there. Another 800 people work on the car and then the drivers and all that. We just made this up right? Like this is all and all of our lives is richer because it exists.
You know my favorite thing about Formula 1 is actually though is the importance of storytelling. If you follow Formula 1 for 10 years, you'll remember it was Bernie Ecclestone and a bluntly an aging sport with middle-aged to older men only liking it with a really decaying audience. Drive to Survive saved the sport in many respects.
100%. Because it brought the best part out which was accessible to the people who really really really worked hard on pulling the sort of story. And like if you watch Rush, you know I grew up in Germany so Niki Lauda was like a hero in the Germanic like he was everywhere right. And what a story that is right. And if you haven't listened to this and haven't watched the movie just definitely watch Rush. It's like it's one of the greatest. The sport has had its heroes and its nemeses and its rivalries in such a way but it couldn't get it out until it got combined with you know media essentially Hollywood and Liberty Media. And so it's like bringing like think about how much growth there is and therefore how much entertainment and delight just by putting pieces together in a new way right? Like aging sport about a rule book plus spectacle ends up being something that's way more value than you would ever imagine. And 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? And 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 like to be brought from the hypothetical things that could exist into the actual things and once things are actual then people can use money to move wealth around. And this is where our economies grow. I feel like this is worth saying because there's an enormous amount at least half of population is utterly confused about how this all works and makes very very bad choices due to this.
Do you worry that the US hates wealth more than ever before? Yeah. You said about your friends who stopped working. I have many of those friends. But there is a hatred towards wealth that has never been so visible in my eyes as an outsider looking in at the US.
I mean I think we are probably at a high water mark for United States but it's still sufficiently low that it's fine and easily can get into self-healing. I look I think I mean honestly the more wealth and resources an entity or even an individual has the more deserving of scrutiny they are. Like the thing that isn't working right now is that the 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 Toby?
I mean we should like there's just simply no chance that we shouldn't be sort of deeply deeply deeply in fact daily thankful for what Elon is doing on planet. Like he's so singular. My car I did not touch the steering wheel of my car this morning, right? Like it just drove me. It also didn't use any gasoline. I don't care particularly about this, but that's just hell. That's cool to have that option. And it's also an amazing car. So like I have a Model Y. I love it. And so and by the way, that Model Y that I love is like a car that is incredibly affordable compared to the norms of cars, right? I it's better than any of the whatever like Kias I could potentially buy. I have no interest in those because they're not as good as a car. Then I'm going on a longer trip with that car. I also put a Starlink unit into the back and then just like you know if someone else drives I can work from there. That's also Elon. And so like and then usually I open my phone and talk to like the planet Earth increasingly. I don't know if you're on X what you will have seen is like you're getting a lot of replies from people in Japan. Turns out like just you know like Hitchhiker's Guide like you know the Babel fish. You know how central that is to the story. It's like just cool. You know what? The biggest share your thoughts good or bad system on planet earth is X right now. And the biggest one-to-n at least biggest follower accounts and so you know there's no barriers anymore. You just talk. Someone says something really really smart in French or Arabic or any other language and I see it in my feed and like we can have a conversation in English back and they see it in like and so on and so on. I will spend the rest of this podcast talking about the incredible gifts that he's made. And of course, he's captured some very small amount like percentage point of all the from the hypothetical value that exists all around us. He actualized like a tremendous amount and captured some of this for himself which he then reuses to do more of it. And like he's like the one man engine. I'm just marveling at this in a way that like holy how cool is it that we live on a planet where when you go through the list of the richest people on planet Earth, all of them have built something and that's incredible. So what I really mean is not about Elon. What I really mean is the misattribution of who we should be angry at. And so it's okay to have a lot of questions of rich people who inherited their wealth and then use it poorly or come to it by divorce for instance. Or if you have not created the wealth you very much are custodian of the wealth and you need to use it gainfully for society. And I think what really sucks in the world is that we are prioritizing things that sound good over things that work. Like we're prioritizing. Real people don't. Everyone knows exactly what's good when you talk to them. It's just that media like especially state-run media and distorting media like the stuff that's been around for a while is you know just hasn't like is on a beat that just 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 is. And they kind of then chastised her for giving it away inefficiently or to the wrong organizations or to the wrong people. And I was like my god. But that's the good part. So this is what I want more.
So maybe we on different sides on this, but like again giving something money ideally through a transaction like any so someone starts a Shopify store sells a new thing ethically sourced leather jackets whatever when you purchase this like presumably it's going to be slightly more expensive than leather. But what you do is you make a vote for it. You make a vote that you think this is a product that should exist and you vote for your money, right? And what will happen afterwards? It's like that creates resources for the company and that means it's a viable product. They can employ people. It's a vote for everything that made this. It's also a vote for the supply chain that it was created. Like the ethically sourced leather now has a customer that's viable, an additional one. Therefore, the numbers go up. Therefore, the factories can go like the production can ramp and eventually like it's going to come down in price and therefore it might even be in fact with federal level there's the potential is to make it cheaper than the alternative that some people have you know just like a lot of issues with. The point is every dollar everyone spends is a vote. Real democracy actually happens by capital allocation that's distributed. This is also why we need markets and why capitalism works because capitalism causes markets. Capitalism doesn't work intrinsically. It 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 are of this. And like I think look if you're very internet this is sort of like hot of the presses but it's just 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 I went to a conference once like I stayed to like went to Ruby conference like 2004 like five maybe first Ruby conference I think first programming conference I ever went to and I stayed for weekend because at the same hotel there's another tech conference which was a conference called doesn't really matter but it was the object-oriented programming conference and you know basically the first talk was well guys I think you won. So not quite sure what you're supposed to talk about because everyone's writing code object-oriented right now. And so it was hilarious. I love the honesty. This is the kind of honesty you can only find amongst nerds. I think they actually I don't know if ended up being held again but like I think everyone was just sort of like doing a victory lap over their cause. And so in real world we don't do that. When we run out of a cause, we cause that cause to continue because. And so I think there should be a lot of scrutiny for how money is allocated.
Do you not think by placing such scrutiny on giving you just prevent people from doing it in the first place?
Like giving money is not virtuous unless it causes the right things even if it sounds good. We need to get away from making good sounding things being beyond scrutiny. Like you need to figure you need to look at the data. You really need to figure out what effects you're causing in the world, right? And so what I worry about is people what I worry about there's people like respectfully you and I don't mean to make this personal but you don't have time to do the DD on the organizations that you're giving money to. You're building an incredible business changing a generational
So then you just don't bother. But if I said to you here's an amazing organization just trust me on it. While the scrutiny would say don't freaking do it. You like Harry but you don't know so it stops all giving and then good organizations that would have got money don't get it whatever good organizations.
This is totally like you show us good organizations they are getting a lot of money trust me money is being captured by really bad actors in these systems. You will very likely tell me about Mark Carnegie's libraries very soon because that is the go-to example that is a hundred something years ago like that's the thing that really worked. Built hospitals that wasn't. Carnegie built libraries, complete banger, right?
No, when I thought good, I just thought of Jensen and Bloom Energy. How we going to fund compute?
I'd rather things. This is the thing like the world has like we have too much charity dollars. And the problem with charity dollars is they can't be given to anything that has a self-healing fitness function like which is very fancy way of saying the words for profit like markets voting of if a thing should exist. And like a not-for-profit like the world term everyone should be deeply suspicious about because you basically said oh the best fitness function mechanism that planet earth has ever invented the thing that's the only thing that's ever raised anyone out of poverty really at scale is the thing you're not participating in. So you're documenting that you're opting out of markets but you will not tell us what your actual fitness function is. And fitness function is just like how do you know if a game you are on is worth playing and continuing right? Therefore the fitness function is going to be just determined by anyone. It replaces merit of organization with 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 smooth-talkers, the people who it's not the builders who are doing it. They go and then become run these institutions. And by the way this is not a bad thing. This is the system that's set up. Fine and you know sometimes it works and yeah there are great charities.
And do you believe in government intervention? I'm in Europe where we have a lot of government intervention.
No, not really. Well I mean okay so let me rephrase this. Yes. I am a fan of Friedrich List who is a Prussian long before James Hunt and Niki Lauder's rivalry there was Adam Smith, Lassalle and Friedrich List and the Prussian school of economics. And so what the Prussian school says differently to Lassalle 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 to then let the players in this game cause through means of competition extremely positive externalities to accrue to society which you know again happens automatically in profit-seeking markets because again what a company does is it takes the potential value that exists which is infinite, absolutely infinite, corrals into products that other people then vote for. And again the voting mechanism causes then a larger supply chain and more of a supply of these products coming into society and then that creates wealth and then the wealth is part of the society and any dollar that's created from in a place that brings new dollars into the system cycles seven times through society and then in a local way. So dollar flowing into like a community. So this is why it's so important to have local businesses then cycles seven times through the payroll of people in there like again into the company then through payroll out and then to the barista's salary at the local Starbucks and so on and so on. So money itself is amplifying this through mechanisms of trade and also through debt creation by banks. So am I for government interventions? Governments are extremely bad at what they do. Everyone needs to know that like the moment a government takes over anything, it will cost 10 times as much, which is really, really, really bad because it just like you literally can like the second someone says, 'Let's run grocery stores.' As a government, there's going to just be like a couple hundred people like me have to go and build companies to make up the wealth that just simply evaporates in this moment, right? So one of the most inspiring things that humanity has ever done is outsource violence to governments because that is causing you know just like that creates the environment in which personal property can exist and personal property is the boundary condition and foundation of everything else I'm talking about.
We mentioned kind of fears or concerns or where our society's 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 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 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 like Canada ought to be the richest country on planet Earth.
It can become that every moment it wants. It's actually quite easy. It just has to be willing to build some minds, right? Which somehow is controversial.
I've had him on the show multiple times. I would like to see a friend.
Yeah, I love the interview. It was a very good interview you did. I think I watched the second one with Connie.
